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PRESENTED BY 
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THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 
ROBERT E. SPEER 


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CHURCH AND MISSIONS-~ 


By 


ROBERT E. SPEER 
SECRETARY OF THE BOARD OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 
OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN THE 
UNITED STATES 


NEW o YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 
ats yl 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


PREFACE 


No attempt is made in this little book to deal either 
comprehensively or in detail with the whole enterprise 
of foreign missions. The author has sought merely 
to treat a few of the most significant aspects of the 
principles and problems of this work of the Church 
which was primary in the first centuries and is primary 
to-day. 





CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I 
II 


VI 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 


THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF FOREIGN Muis- 
SIONS 


THe SocrtaL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS OF 
MopeErN MIssIons 

New DEMANDS ON THE FoREIGN MIssION 
ENTERPRISE AT THE HOME BASE 


New DEMANDS ON THE Musston FIELD 
CREATED BY NEw Wor.tp ConplirTIOoNsS 


THE RicuH FRUITAGE OF ForREIGN Missions 


PAGE 
Il 


42 


94 


120 


150 


187 


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sae 
FUSS MV TALS 
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| 





THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 





THE 
CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


GHAPTER I 
THROUGH THE CENTURIES 


How soon did the universal note come into Christian- 
ity? Perhaps the essential thing is that it came. Be- 
cause Christianity was what it was, it was inevitable 
that the universal note should appear. But when did 
it appear? Did it lie in Christianity from the begin- 
ning and did it appear from the outset or was it a 
later unfolding? 

On the one hand it is said, the gospel came as es- 
sentially Jewish. Jesus had no other idea of Himself 
than as the Messiah expected of the Jews. “We must 
not suppose,” it is said, “that Jesus was proclaiming 
any other than the promised Messianic Kingdom to 
which the Jews had so long been looking forward. 
. . . He inculcated the most absolute and thorough- 
going conformity to the law, a conformity which 
should far surpass that of the Pharisees. .. . That 
He anticipated that the law should ever be done away 
He showed no sign.” (McGiffert, “The Apostolic 
Age,” p. 19, 25 f.) He limited His own ministry and 
He bade His disciples to limit theirs to the “‘lost sheep 
of the house of Israel.” (Matt. xv, 24; x, 5.) He 


spent His whole life in His native land and had no 
II 


I2 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


knowledge of other peoples and no sense of duty toward 
them. He was born and died a Jew, within the con- 
temporary Jewish horizon, and the universal expansion 
of Christianity came as a later conception and develop- 
ment. (See Harnack, “The Expansion of Christianity 
in the First Three Centuries,” Vol. I, p. 40.) 
On the other hand, even if we eliminate the Fourth 
Gospel and accept the critical results as to the Synop- 
tics, we cannot fail to see that the Gospel held from 
the beginning in the thought of Jesus the principle of 
universality. The opening words of the Gospel of 
Mark set forth the conception of the Kingdom, and 
the Gospel forbids an exclusively nationalistic inter- 
pretation of the conception. It represents Jesus as the 
beloved Son of God, with a significance in the ideas 
which includes humanity. The idea of God’s father- 
hood and of a Kingdom not of Israel but of God, the 
God Who was behind all things and Who made rains 
to fall and the sun to shine was an idea wider than 
‘any one race or nation. And the fact that Jesus 
“maintained a conservative attitude toward the law 
does not indicate that He meant to exclude Gentiles 
from the Kingdom of God.” “During the earlier part 
of His ministry,” says Dr. McGiffert, ‘““He seems to 
have had only His own countrymen in mind” (Matt. 
x, 5, Mark vii, 27), “but before His death, when He 
realised that His Gospel would be rejected by the na- 
tion at large, He distinctly contemplated the entrance 
of foreign peoples into the Kingdom.” (Matt. viii, 
11 ff., xxi, 43.) (McGiffert, “The Apostolic Age,” 
p. 26 f.) 

Taking our Gospels as they stand we must claim 
for Christianity a universal principle from the begin- 
ning. Our Lord was the Son of Man. This was His 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 13 


favourite title for Himself. Connecting the parallel 
passages we find Him using the title thirty-nine times 
in the Synoptics and ten times in the Gospel of John. 
Whether He borrowed it from the contemporary Mes- 
sianic vocabulary, which is improbable, or took it from 
the Book of Daniel, which is possible but also im- 
probable, He filled it with new meaning. The title for- 
bade any nationalistic limitations. It carried with it 
implicitly the conception of the universal significance 
of the person and mission of Jesus. It described Him 
as “the indispensable centre of the Kingdom of God in 
humanity’ (Holzmann); as “the perfect realisation 
of the idea of man, with the mission of realising it in 
humanity” (Wittichen); “the man in whom all the 
history of humanity must have its end” (Hofmann) ; 
“the universal Messiah” (Bohme); “the representa- 
tive of the race in whom are united the virtual powers 
of the whole of humanity” (Westcott). (See von 
Schubert “Outlines of Church History,” p. 24 f.) 
The universal sweep given to Christianity in the 
opening chapters of Luke is warranted. (Luke 1, 79; 
li, 14, 30, 32; iii, 6). Our Lord came in no mould 
of racial exclusiveness but with a mission opened in 
its essential character from the beginning to all man- 
kind. One of His earliest sermons gave great offence 
because He laid emphasis on the outreaching grace of 
God. Elijah, He pointed out, had been sent to none 
of the widows of Israel in the days of famine but to a 
Sidonian woman, and Elisha had cleansed no lepers of 
Israel but only Naaman, the Syrian. “And they were 
all filled with wrath as they heard these things” (Luke 
iv, 25-29). The same spirit of nationalistic narrow- 
ness, from which Jesus was free, found expression in 
the sneer of the Jews at Jesus’ declaration, “Ye shall 


14. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


seek Me and shall not find Me; and where I am, ye 
cannot come. The Jews therefore said among them-_ 
selves, Whither will this man go that we shall not find 
Him? Will He go unto the Dispersion among the 
Greeks, and teach the Greeks?’ (John vii, 34, 35). 
As though in contrast with this smallness of vision, 
John proceeds to relate the words of Jesus on the last, 
the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, beginning, 
“Tf any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink” 
(John vii, 37). 

This contrast between the attitude of Jesus and the 
attitude of the Jews is sharply presented in their rela- 
tions to the Samaritans. The Jews had no dealings 
with the Samaritans (John iv, 9), and when they 
would be especially bitter and contemptuous in their 
reference to Jesus they said to Him, “Thou art a Sa- 
maritan and hast a devil” (John viii, 48). The later 
tradition declared, “It is forbidden to eat bread or to 
drink wine with the Samaritans.” But Jesus ignored 
and violated these restraints. “He went and entered 
into a village of the Samaritans” (Luke ix, 52). He 
sent His disciples into a Samaritan village to buy food 
and welcomed the people of the village to faith and 
discipleship (John iv, 39-42). And He deliberately 
gave to a Samaritan a place in one of His most ex- 
quisite parables above Levite and priest (Luke x, 33). 

It was significant that the first people to recognise 
the universal mission of Jesus were Samaritans. “We 
know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world,” 
they said (John iv, 42). Yet in some sense, this sweep 
of the work of Jesus had been already perceived. The 
song of the angels suggested it (Luke ii, 10, 14). 
Aged Simeon foresaw it. “Mine eyes have seen thy 
salvation,” he said as the child Jesus lay in his arms, 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 15 


“Which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples 
A light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke ii, 31, 32). 


And John the Baptist hinted at it also? “The Lamb 
of God which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 
i, 29). Thenceforward it was revealed with increas- 
ing clearness that Jesus was in the world for the world. 
He said, Himself, that the field was the world (Matt. 
xili, 38). His disciples were the light of the world 
(Matt. v, 14), as He had come a light into the world 
(John xii, 46), and was Himself the world’s light 
(John viii, 12). He called Himself the bread of God 
which had come down for the life of the world (John 
vi, 33, 35). 

Indeed, throughout, Jesus will admit no narrower 
field of work and salvation for Himself than the world. 
There are apparently contradictory statements. “I am 
not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” 
(Matt. xv, 24). “Go not into any way of the Gen- 
tiles and enter not into any city of the Samaritans” 
(Matt. x, 5). Jesus had to make a beginning. His 
immediate mission was to Israel. The only way in 
which any larger mission could be made possible was 
by the discharge of this mission to the Jews. A sal- 
vation for all was to be wrought out in time and 
space, and until the work was done the field was con- 
fined. But beyond all the immediate and preparatory 
work lay the universal reaches of a redemption for all 
mankind. Jesus was such a good Israelite in order 
that the mission of Israel might be fulfilled and there 
be henceforth neither Jew nor Greek. Accordingly 
the whole spirit and message of Jesus were universal. 
“God sent not His son into the world to condemn the 
world but that the world through Him might be saved” 


16 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


(John iii, 16,17). He contemplated the conviction of 
the world (John xvi, 8; xvii, 21, 23), and the preach- 
ing of His gospel among all nations (Matt. xii, 14; 
xxvi, 13). And even before His coming He said the 
Father had intended the temple to be a place of prayer 
for all nations (Matt. xi, 17), while now all local 
limits were set aside and everywhere true worshippers 
were invited to come immediately to the Father with- 
out temple and without priest (John iv, 20-24). 

Jesus told of a good Father over all (Matt. v, 45- 
48), of a light in Himself adequate for all guidance 
(John viii, 12), of Himself as the only way to the 
Father (John xiv, 6), and as the truth and the life 
(John xiv, 6). In view of all this the nation in which 
He was could be the starting point only, not the goal. 
His gospel was a message for all men everywhere. 
His last commands, accordingly, did not create the 
missionary obligation. They merely expressed it 
(Matt. xxvii, 19; Mark xvi, 15; Acts i, 8). If He 
had not uttered them the obligation would not have 
been diminished in the slightest degree. But having 
uttered them our duty has been made so clear that 
we can miss it only by missing Christ and His signifi- 
cance to our own hearts. 

At the same time the first disciples found it hard 
to grasp the full significance of the missionary idea 
and to embody it in the life and work of the Church. 
They had a number of pressing problems to face, the 
task of thinking out their situation, of recording the 
amazing history through which they had passed, of 
working out institutions, of meeting the practical is- 
sues of social relationships within the new Christian 
community and between that community and the world 
without, the everlasting problem of Church and State, 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 17 


of the national and supra-national aspects of Chris- 
tianity, of defining their convictions and beginning tq 
glimpse the immense theological and apologetic work 
which lay before them. At their doors, moreover, 
they had their first task, to witness to their faith and 
to win fellow disciples from sea townsmen and im- 
mediate neighbours. 

Just how and how soon the Gospel began to spread 
we have no record. The legends of the far reaching 
labours of the apostles in other lands are only legends. 
What we know is that there began almost at once a 
great, unorganised, spontaneous evangelistic movement 
and that very soon foreign missions were specialised 
as a distinct activity under bold and heroic leadership, 
as has been necessary in every age of the Christian 
Church and as is still necessary to-day. 

The first outward movement of Christianity resulted 
from the persecutions following the death of Stephen. 
The Gospel had indeed already been “carried at least 
to Damascus and there can be little doubt that the 
fugitive disciples found believers to welcome them in 
many quarters. We are not to think of them as be- 
coming travelling evangelists, and spending all their 
time in going from place to place preaching the Gospel. 
They had their daily bread to earn, and they doubtless 
settled down quietly among their own countrymen in 
this and that place, and lived the life of faithful, scru- 
pulous Jews, just as they had done in Jerusalem, and 
just as their neighbours were doing. But at the same 
time they must have retained the ideal of the Christian 
life which they had seen realised in Jerusalem, and 
the little circles in which they gathered with others 
of like mind, and with those whom they succeeded in 
winning to their faith, could not fail to take on the 


18 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


character of the circle to which they had there be- 
longed; and thus at an early day among the Jewish 
population of many cities, towns and villages within 
and without Palestine, the same kind of Christian 
brotherhood was realised that had existed from the 
beginning in Jerusalem. The flight of the disciples 
therefore did not mean merely the spread of a knowl- 
edge of the Gospel, it meant also the formation of lit- 
tle companies of Christian brethren, wherever they 
made their homes.” (McGiffert, “The Apostolic Age,” 
Pp. 94). | | . 

All this, however, was still work within the nation. 
The distinctive foreign mission had to wait for Paul. 
There were, to be sure, antecedents of his undertak- 
ing. Philip went on a mission to the Samaritans 
which the Apostles sanctioned and followed up, and 
later he found and baptised the first convert from 
Africa. And Peter with characteristic courage ac- 
cepted the responsibility of baptising a gentile soldier 
from Italy. But it was Paul who really began the en- 
terprise of foreign missions in the first century as it 
required Carey to re-begin it in the eighteenth. And 
yet Paul did not begin it as a self-originated project. 
He was at first subordinate to an older companion. 
They were both called out and sent forth from a Chris- 
tian community. And their mission unfolded as they 
followed it. 

The beginning of missions confirms the experience 
of missions in all ages. Given a missionary church 
or body of believers, and a foreign mission is the in- 
evitable consequence. If the mission, or an attempt at 
it, is lacking, it is proof that the Spirit is lacking in 
the church, 

The money problem is not mentioned, nor is any- 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES Ig 


thing said of organisation. God and men, men and 
God—that is all. That is always all. Money and ma- 
chinery are secondary to-day as they were then. We 
are guilty of distortion and distrust and atheism when 
we put them first. But simple as was the sending out 
of these first missionaries, it does not follow that now 
the wise thing is for each local church to act in the 
independent fashion of the church at Antioch, and se- 
lect and commission and send out its own representa- 
tives. It would be easy to relate stories of the dismal 
failure and wrong of some experiments of this sort. 
In our sense of words, this first foreign mission was 
not a foreign mission at all. The missionaries went 
among their own people. They never went out of the 
bounds of their own government, and they learned no 
new language, tried no new climate, touched no for- 
eign land. It was a deputation rather than a mission. 
The real lesson for us is not a lesson of rigid method, 
but a suggestion of principle, namely, that by the meth- 
ods which experience has approved, each church should 
be in vital contact with the missionary enterprise and 
participating in it. The method of the sending forth 
of these first missionaries is not a reflection on mod- 
erm missionary organisations. It is significant that 
those societies and missions which seem to emphasise 
most the call of the Spirit, are the most highly organ- 
ised and the most authoritatively governed. 

This itineration was a modest venture, a preliminary 
trial, a test of wings. The missionaries turned first 
naturally to territory which Barnabas knew. He had 
lived in Cyprus, owned property there, and personally 
possessed influence that made their visit to the island 
a matter of no great risk. Here they went first to 
Jews, as had been and was still to be for some time 


20 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


the almost invariable evangelistic rule. Even on this 
trip, however, a gleam of the wider mission came to 
them. The Jews came first of necessity, the mission- 
aries felt and said they felt, but the gospel was for 
Gentiles too (Acts xiii, 46, 47). And when they re- 
ported to the home church on their return, the domi- 
nant impression of the itineration evidently was that 
God “had opened a door of faith unto the Gentiles” 
(Acts xiv, 27). The mission revealed itself, and fed 
the spirit which had created it. 

The missionaries moved. It had required persecu- 
tion to stir up the Jerusalem believers. But now men 
had been raised up with the spirit of the great commis- 
sion in their blood. They were going men. If re- 
jected, they went on (Acts xiii, 50, 51). They were 
not afraid of persecution. They took it when it came 
in the line of their duty, but also they had no hesita- 
tion in running away from it (Acts xiv, 5). If it was 
necessary to be beaten, they bore it joyfully; but Paul 
had no principle against going down over walls to es- 
cape danger (Acts ix, 25), or leaving places which 
were too hot. Still, they came right back to these 
places on this trip. If they fled, it was not from fear, 
and if they returned, it was not from hardihood. They 
went in the way of duty. That was all. If mission- 
aries in China could do no good by staying in interior 
towns during the Boxer troubles, and only imperilled | 
the Chinese converts by remaining, it was their duty, 
following Paul’s example, to leave. If their remain- 
ing at their post and accepting death would have helped 
the cause, they would have done right to stay, and those 
who did stay, did what Paul would have done in their 
place. 

The missionaries did not move just for the sake 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 21 


of moving. Itineration with them was not mere travel 
or sight-seeing. It was hard, well-directed preaching. 
To do this work thoroughly they retraced their steps 
(Acts xiv, 21), even to Lystra and Iconium, where 
they had been rejected, and whence they had fled. 
Those missionaries in China who after the troubles 
returned to their stations, some of them before even 
the consuls were ready to encourage them, also were 
following Paul’s example. On this itineration the mis- 
sionaries did more than just “herald” the gospel. They 
organised the believers. No priests were set over the 
little companies to exercise authority by virtue of apos- 
tolic succession. All was life and motion and free- 
dom. Neither did Barnabas and Paul employ a helper 
and place him over the group. They hit upon a per- 
fectly simple, natural, self-supporting arrangement, de- 
signed to secure liberty, growth and the sense of re- 
sponsibility. Fuller developments would come later, 
but this was enough for the beginning. Perhaps if 
Paul had had no results of his work he might have 
employed a different method. But he had results, and 
this was the way he took care of them. 

The sole reliance of the missionaries was the Gos- 
pel (Acts xiv, 21). They had absolutely no ulterior 
inducements to offer. No social, educational or phil- 
anthropic advantages had been evolved which could 
act as attractions to draw the people toward Chris- 
tianity. It was not yet a proscribed religion. Its rela- 
tion to the government and the imperial court had 
not been defined. But if not under the ban, there was 
nothing to commend it but its spiritual efficiency and 
its response to the deepest needs of human hearts. Paul 
did some signs and wonders (Acts xiv, 3, 10; xiii, 
11), but one of them made them more trouble than it 


22 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


did good, and on the contrary side he assured believers 
that tribulation was in store for them (Acts xiv, 22). 
Many a modern missionary has wished that he was as 
free from the financial, political and social entangle- 
ments of Christianity in his enterprise, that he might 
deal with men on spiritual ground alone. The penalty 
of the long postponement of the evangelisation of the 
world is twofold—(1) the social and racial chasm be- 
tween “Christians” and “heathen” has become ter- 
rible in its width and depth and permanence, and (2) 
Christianity has come to terms with culture, commerce 
and politics, so that it is well-nigh impossible to dis- 
engage it and present it to Gentile and Jew as in the 
first generation. ; 

A noble picture of true missionary wisdom and con- 
secration is presented in the course of Barnabas. As 
he and Paul met their new problems and did their new 
work, the older man began to shift the responsibilities 
to the shoulders of the younger, whose capacities he had 
long before foreseen. He pushes him forward, does 
not quarrel with his growing prominence, happily slips 
into the second place after their visit to Antioch in 
Pisidia, and finds his joy in the increasing power of 
Paul. Here is the picture of a large-natured, fine- 
spirited, sagacious man, doing the greatest work of his 
life in developing Paul and lovingly shaping his 
growth. The man who could bear himself thus was 
a good man. He was even a great man. ‘There is 
room in every age for missionaries of this spirit, who 
see ability in others, and who lay themselves out to 
develop it, and who then can rejoice in it without 
jealousy. And this is the true principle of foreign 
missions. Their business is to found in each land a 
native church and to recognise its freedom and duty. 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 23 


The great problem which shook the early Church 
became more clearly defined on this tour. That prob- 
lem of the relation of the Gentile converts to the 
Jewish law, and in consequence, the relation of the 
Jewish Christians themselves to their institutions, had 
to be settled. These first missionaries did well to per- 
ceive this. There is nothing gained and much lost by 
slurring over in mission work the inevitable issues and 
collisions which must arise. These must be dealt with 
in the spirit of love, but also in the spirit of firmness 
and of a sound mind. Missions do not rest upon a 
maudlin erasure of all lines of distinct opinion of truth, 
and the purchase of good feeling by the surrender of 
principle to sentimental slovenliness. They involve the 
stern clash of truth and error. These early missionary 
days show how much better it is to have the issue clear 
and naked, and to settle it with sharp and positive 
finality, if it be possible. 

These were the beginnings, The sequels in the 
apostolic age were the definite settlement of the uni- 
versal mission of Christianity, the working out of the 
methods of propaganda and the principles of church 
organisation, the statement of the truth of the Gospel 
in terms of its universal significance and adaptations 
and the demonstration of the power of the Risen Christ 
as the Saviour of the world. 

In “The Expansion of Christianity in the First 
Three Centuries,’ Harnack describes what he believes 
to have been the nature of the missionary preaching of 
the early propaganda and also the power lying back of 


be 


“These four points, then—the one living God, Jesus 
as Saviour and Judge, the resurrection, and self-control 


24 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


—combined to form the new religion. It stood out in 
bold relief from the old religions, and above all from 
the Jewish; yet, in spite of its stiff conflict with poly- 
theism, it lay in organic relation to the process of evolu- 
tion which was at work throughout all religion, upon 
the eastern and the central coasts of the Mediterranean. 
The atmosphere from which those four principles drew 
their vitality was the conception of recompense—i.e., 
the absolute supremacy of the moral element in life. 
No account of the principles underlying the mission- 
preaching of Christianity is accurate, if it does not 
view everything from the standpoint of this conception. 
‘Grace’ did play a leading role, but grace never displaced 
recompense. From the very first, morality was incul- 
cated within the Christian churches in two ways: by 
the Spirit of Christ and by the conception of judgment 
and of recompense. Both were marked by a decided 
bent to the future, for the Christ of both was ‘He who 
was to return.’ To the mind of primitive Christianity 
the ‘present’ and the ‘future’ were sharply opposed to 
each other, and it was this opposition which furnished 
the principle of self-control with its most powerful 
motive. It became, indeed, with many people, a sort 
of glowing passion. The church which prayed at every 
service, ‘May grace come and this world pass away: 
maranatha,’ was the church which gave directions like 
those which we read in the opening parable of Hermas. 
‘From the lips of all Christians this word is to be heard: 
The world is crucified to me, and I to the world.’ 
(Celsus, cited by Origen, V, lxiv). 

“This resolute renunciation of the world was really 
the first thing which made the church competent and 
strong to tell upon the world. Then, if ever, was the 
saying verified: “He who would do anything for the 
world must have nothing to do with it.’ Primitive 
Christianity has been upbraided for being too unworldly 
and ascetic. But revolutions are not effected with rose- 
water, and it was a veritable revolution to overthrow 
polytheism and to set up the majesty of God and good- 
ness in the world—for those who believed in them, as 
well as for those who did not. This could not have 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 25 


transpired in the first instance, had not men asserted 
the vanity of the present world, and practically severed 
themselves from it. The rigour of this attitude was 
scarcely abated by the mission-preaching; on the con- 
trary, it was aggravated, since instead of being isolated 
it was set side by side with the message of the Saviour 
and of salvation, of love and charity. Yet it must be 
added, that for all its clear-cut expression, and the 
strong bias it imparted to the minds of men towards 
the future, the idea of recompense was freed from 
harshness and inertia by its juxtaposition with a feeling 
of perfect confidence that God was present, and a con- 
viction of His care and of His providence. No mode 
of thought was more alien to early Christianity than 
deism. The early Christians knew the Father in 
heaven; they knew that God was near them, guiding 
them, and reigning in their life with a might of His 
own, This was the God they proclaimed abroad. And 
thus, in their preaching, the future became already 
present, while hard and fast recompense seemed to dis- 
appear entirely. For what further ‘recompense’ was 
needed by the people who were living in God’s presence, 
feeling with every faculty of the soul, aye, and with 
every sense, the wisdom, power and goodness of their 
God? Moods of assured possession and of yearning, 
experiences of grace and phases of ardent hope, came 
and went in many a man besides the apostle Paul. 
He yearned for the prospect of release from the body, 
and thus felt a touching sympathy for everything in 
bondage, for the whole creation in its groans. But it 
was no harassing or uncertain hope that engrossed all 
his heart and being; it was hope fixed upon a strong 
and secure basis, upon his filial relationship to God 
and his possession of God’s Spirit. 

“Now, for the first time, that testimony rose among 
men, which cannot ever be surpassed, the testimony 
that God is Love. The first great statement of the 
new religion, into which the fourth evangelist condensed 
its central principle, was based entirely and exclusively 
on love: ‘We love, because He first loved us.’ ‘God 
so loved the world. ‘A new commandment give I 


26 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


unto you, that ye love one another.’ And the greatest, 
strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote is the hymn 
commencing with the words: “Though I speak with the 
tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am 
become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.’ The new 
language on the lips of Christians was the language of 
love. 

“But it was more than a language, it was a thing 
of power and action. The Christians really considered 
themselves brothers and sisters, and their actions cor- 
responded to this belief. On this point we possess two 
exceptionable testimonies from pagan writers. Says 
Lucian of the Christians: ‘Their original law-giver had 
taught them that they were all brethren, one of an- 
other. ... They become incredibly alert when any- 
thing of this kind occurs, that affects their common 
interests. On such occasions no expense is grudged.’ 
And Tertullian (Apolog. xxxix.) observes: ‘It is our 
care for the helpless, our practice of loving-kindness, 
that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents.’ 
‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’ 
(they themselves being given to mutual hatred). ‘Look 
how they are prepared to die for one another!’ Thus 
had this saying been really fulfilled: ‘Hereby shall all 
men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one 
to another.’ 

“The gospel thus became a social message. The 
preaching which laid hold of the outer man, detaching 
him from the world, and uniting him to his God, was 
also a preaching of solidarity and brotherliness. The 
gospel, it has been truly said, is at bottom both individ- 
ualistic and socialistic. Its tendency towards mutual 
association, so far from being an accidental phenom- 
enon in its history, is inherent in its character. It 
spiritualises the irresistible impulse which draws one 
man to another, and it raises the social connection of 
human beings from the sphere of a convention to that 
of a moral obligation. In this way it serves to heighten 
the worth of man, and essays to recast contemporary 
society, to transform the socialism which involves a con- 
flict of interests into the socialism which rests upon the 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 27 


consciousness of a spiritual unity and a common goal. 
This was ever present to the mind of the great Apostle 
to the Gentiles. In his little churches, where each per- 
son bore his neighbour’s burden, Paul’s spirit already 
saw the dawning of a new humanity, and in the epistle 
to the Ephesians he has voiced this feeling with a thrill 
of exultation. Far in the background of these churches, 
like some unsubstantial semblance, lay the division be- 
tween Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, great and 
small, rich and poor. For a new humanity had now 
appeared, and the apostle viewed it as Christ’s body, 
in which every member served the rest and each was 
indispensable in his own place. Looking at these 
churches, with all their troubles and infirmities, he an- 
ticipated, in his high moments of enthusiasm, what was 
the development of many centuries.” (op. cit., Vol. I, 
pp. 116 f., 183 f.). 


The missionary history of the Church for the first 
three centuries has many lessons for modern foreign 
missions. It made the widest use of the Old Testa- 
ment and later of the New as foreign missions have 
done. It made no compromise with polytheism or idol 
worship. At the same time it did not sanction abuse of 
the gods or unprovoked insult to idols. In the sixtieth 
canon of Elvira, we read: “If any one shall have 
broken an idol and been slain in the act, he shall not 
be reckoned among the martyrs, seeing that no such 
command is to be found in scripture, nor will any such 
deed be found done among the apostles.” (ibid., Vol. 
I, p. 369.) It did not sanction civil disobedience or 
disloyalty. “The very keenest criticism passed by in- 
dividual Christian teachers upon the nature of the Ro- 
man state and the imperial office never enjoined the 
neglect of intercession or dissuaded Christians from 
this duty. Numerous passages in which the emperor 
is mentioned immediately after God, attest the fact that 


28 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


he was held by Christians to be ‘a deo secundus ante 
omnes et super omnes deos’ (Tertull., Apol. xxx. : ‘sec- 
ond only to God, before and above all the gods’). 
Christians, in fact, could declare that they allowed the 
presence of no defect, either in the theory or in the 
practice of their loyalty. They taught—and they made 
their teaching part of the world’s history—that worship 
paid to God was one thing, and honour paid to a ruler 
quite another, as also that to worship a monarch was 
a detestable and humiliating offence. None the less, 
they strictly inculcated obedience to all authority.” 
(ibid. Wolk Iyp..373 ft.) 

The situation at the end of the third century is de- 
scribed by Harnack in an epilogue: 


‘How rich, then, how manifold, are the ramifications 
of the Christian religion at the very outset as it steps 
on to pagan soil! And every separate point appears 
to be the main point, every single aspect looks like the 
whole! It is the preaching of God the Father Almighty, 
of His Son the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the resurrec- 
tion. It is the gospel of the Saviour and of salvation. 
It is the gospel of love and charity. It is the religion 
of the Spirit and power, of moral earnestness and holi- 
ness. It is the religion of authority and of an unlimited 
faith, and again, the religion of reason and of enlight- 
ened understanding, besides being a religion of “‘mys- 
teries.’ It proclaims the origin of a new people, of a 
people which has existed in secret from the very be- 
ginning of things. It is the religion of a sacred book. 
It possessed, nay, it was, everything that can possibly 
be considered as religion. 

“Christianity thus showed itself to be syncretistic. 
But it revealed to the world a special kind of syncretism, 
namely, the syncretism of a universal religion. Every 
force, every relationship in its environment, was mas- 
tered by it and made to serve its own ends—a feature 
in which the other religions in the Roman Empire make 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 29 


but a poor, meagre, and a narrow show. Yet uncon- 
sciously it learned and borrowed from many quarters; 
indeed it would be impossible to imagine it existing amid 
all the wealth and vigour of these religions, had it not 
drawn pith and flavour even from them. These reli- 
gions fertilised the ground for it, and the new grain 
and seed which fell upon that soil sent down its roots 
and grew to be a mighty tree. Here is a religion which 
embraces everything, and yet it can always be expressed 
in perfectly simple terms: one name, the name of Jesus 
Christ, still sums up everything. 

“The syncretism of this religion is further shown by 
its faculty for incorporating the most diverse nation- 
alities—Parthians, Medes and Elamites, Greeks and 
Barbarians. It laughed at the barriers of nationality. 
While attracting to itself all popular elements, it 
repudiated only one, viz., that of the Jewish nationalism. 
But this very repudiation was a note of universalism, 
for, although Judaism had been divested of its national- 
ism and already turned into a universal religion, its 
universalism had remained for two centuries confined 
to narrow limits. And how universal did Christianity 
show itself, in relation to the capacities and culture of 
mankind! Valentinus is a contemporary of Hermas, 
and both are Christians; Tertullian and Clement of 
Alexandria are contemporaries, and both are teachers 
in the Church; Eusebius is a contemporary of St. An- 
thony, and both are in the service of the same com- 
munion.” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 391 f.). 


The whole organisation of the Christian Church 
during the second and third centuries was directed 
toward the dissemination of Christianity and the es- 
tablishment of the Church throughout the Empire. 
There were various orders of agents engaged in the 
great task, but “the most numerous and successful 
missionaries of the Christian religion were not the reg- 
ular teachers but Christians themselves, by dint of their 
loyalty and courage. How little we hear of the former 


30 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


and their results! How much of the effects produced 
by the latter! Above all, every confessor and martyr 
was a missionary; he not merely confirmed the faith of 
those who were already won, but also enlisted new 
members by his testimony and his death. . . . Never- 
theless, it was not merely the confessors and martyrs 
who were missionaries. It was characteristic of this 
religion that every one who seriously confessed the 
faith proved of service to its propaganda. Christians 
are to ‘let their light shine, that pagans may see their 
good works and glorify the Father in heaven.’ If this 
dominated all their life, and if they lived according to 
the precepts of their religion, they could not be hidden 
at all; by their very mode of living they could not fail 
to preach their faith plainly and audibly. Then there 
was the conviction that the Day of Judgment was at 
hand, and that they were debtors to the heathen. Fur- 
thermore, so far from narrowing Christianity, the ex- » 
clusiveness of the gospel was a powerful aid in pro- 
moting its mission, owing to the sharp dilemma which 
it involved. 

“We cannot hesitate to believe that the great mis- 
sion of Christianity was in reality accomplished by 
means of informal missionaries. Justin says so quite 
explicitly. What won him over was the impression 
made by the moral life which he found among Chris- 
tians in general.” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 458 ff.) 

But towards the close of the third century the for- 
eign missionary undertaking underwent a deteriora- 
tion. 


“Powerful and vigorous, assured of her own dis- 
tinctive character, and secure from any risk of being 
dissolved into contemporary religions, the Church be- 
lieved herself able now to deal more generously and 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 3 


complaisantly with men, provided only that they would 
submit to her authority. Her missionary methods al- 
tered slowly but significantly in the course of the third 
century. Gregory Thaumaturgus, who shows himself a 
pupil of Origen in his religious philosophy, with its 
comprehensive statement of Christianity, but who, as a 
Hellenist, excels his master, accommodated himself as 
a bishop in a truly surprising way to the pagan ten- 
dencies of those whom he converted. We shall hear of 
him later on. Saints and intercessors, who were thus 
semi-gods, poured into the Church. Local cults and 
holy places were instituted. The different provinces 
of life were distributed afresh among guardian spirits. 
The old gods returned; only, their masks were new. 
Annual festivals were noisily celebrated. Amulets and 
charms, relics and bones of the saints, were all objects 
of desire. And the very religion which erstwhile in its 
strictly spiritual temper had prohibited and resisted any 
tendency towards materialism, now took material shape 
in every one of its relationships. It had killed the 
world and nature. But now it proceeded to revive 
them, not of course in their entirety, but still in cer- 
tain sections and details, and—what is more—in phases 
that were dead and repulsive. Miracles in the churches 
became more numerous, more external, and more 
coarse. Whatever incidents the apocryphal Acts of the 
Apostles had narrated in the course of their fables, were 
dragged into contemporary life and predicated of the 
living present. 

“This Church, amid whose religion Porphyry found 
blameworthy features in its audacious critique of the 
universe, its doctrine of the incarnation, and its asser- 
tion of the resurrection of the flesh—this Church 
laboured at her mission in the second half of the third 
century, and she won the day. But had she been sum- 
moned to the bar and asked what right she had to admit 
these novelties, she could have replied: ‘I am not to 
blame. I have but developed the germ which was 
planted in my being from the very first!’ This religion 
was the first to cut the ground from under the feet of 
all other religions, and by means of her religious phi- 


32 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


losophy, as a civilising power, to displace ancient phi- 
losophy. But the reasons for the triumph to Chris- 
tianity in that age are no guarantee for the permanence 
of that triumph throughout the history of mankind. 
Such a triumph rather depends upon the simple ele- 
ments of the religion, on the preaching of the living 
God as the Father of men, and on the likeness of Jesus 
Christ. For that very reason it depends also on the 
capacity of Christianity to strip off once more any 
collective syncretism and unite itself to fresh co- 
efficients. The Reformation made a beginning in this 


direction.” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 395 ff.). 


The Reformation, however, was twelve centuries 
away. What became of the foreign missionary idea 
and enterprise in the interval? The triumph of the 
Church in the Roman state under Charlemagne, with 
all its consequences of good and evil, and the division 
of the Church into West and East in 867 left the old 
Roman world nominally Christian. But around it lay 
three groups of unevangelised races which constituted 
the foreign mission field of the Middle Ages, the Celts, 
the Teutons and the Slavs, and which Christianity 
sought to reach even before they established themselves 
on the ruins of the Roman Empire. On the process of 
this evangelisation we have but scanty information. 


“ “We know as little in detail,’ remarks Schlegel, ‘of 
the circumstances under which Christianity became so 
universally spread in a short space of time among all 
the Gothic nations, as of the establishment, step by 
step, of their great kingdom on the Black Sea.’ The 
rapid and universal diffusion, indeed, of the new faith, 
is a proof of that capacity for civilisation, and of the 
national connection of the whole race; but where shall 
we find the details of their conversion? We have not 
a record, not even a legend, of the way in which the 
Visigoths in France, the Ostrogoths in Pannonia, the 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 33 


Suevians in Spain, the Gepide, the Vandals, the fol- 
lowers of Odoacer, and the fiery Lombards, were con- 
verted to the Christian faith, We may trace this, in 
part, to the terrible desolation which at this period 
reigned everywhere, while nation warred against nation, 
and tribe against tribe; we may trace, still more, to the 
fact that every one of the tribes above mentioned was 
converted to the Arian form of Christianity, a sufficient 
reason in the eyes of Catholic historians for ignoring 
altogether the efforts of heretics to spread the knowl- 
edge of the faith. And till the close of the sixth and 
the opening of the seventh century, we must be content 
with the slenderest details, if we wish to know anything 
of the early diffusion of Christianity on the European 
continent.” (MacLear, “The Missionary History of 
the Middle Ages,” p. 37 f.) 


MacLear’s account of “The Missionary History of 
the Middle Ages’’ is still the best account we have of 
the foreign missions of the Church from the fourth to 
the fifteenth centuries. It sets forth (1) the early 
efforts of the Church among the Goths in 340-508, 
when Ulphilas, Valentinus and Severinus were the mis- 
sionaries on the Danube and in Bavaria and Austria, 
and the conversion of the Franks under Clovis; (2) 
the history of the Church of Ireland and the mission of 
St. Patrick, 431-490; (3) the story of St. Columba 
and Jona and the conversion of the Picts, 380-597; 
(4) the mission of St. Augustine to England, 596-627; 
(5) the progress of missionary work in England under 
Paulinus, Felix, Aidan and Wilfrid, 627-689; (6) the 
labours of the Celtic missionaries from Ireland, 
Columbanus, St. Gall, Kilian and others in southern 
Germany, 590-630; (7) missionary efforts in Fries- 
land and parts adjacent, 628-719; (8) the labour of 
Wilfrid or Boniface in the conversion of Germany, 
715-755; (9) the efforts of the disciples of Boniface, 


34. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Gregory of Utrecht, Sturmi of Fulda, St. Lebuin, 
Liudger and Willehad, 719-789; (10) missionary ef- 
fort in Denmark and Sweden and the work of Anskar, 
the Apostle of the North, 800-1011; (11) the conver- 
sion of Norway, 900-1030; (12) missions among the 
Slavs in Bulgaria, Moravia, Bohemia and Russia, 800- 
1000; (13) the conversion of Poland and Pomerania 
and the work of Otho, 1000-1127; (14) the conversion 
of Wendland, Prussia and Lithuania, 1050-1410; (15) 
missions to the Saracens and the Mongols, the work of 
Raymund Lull and the Nestorian missions, 1200- 
1400; (16) the compulsory conversion of the Jews and 
Moors, 1440-1520. 

Some of the outstanding features of these medi- 
geval missions were: | 

1. The national or political character of many con- 
versions, the people following their kings or chiefs, 
so that Boniface writes: “Without the patronage of 
the Frankish kings I can neither govern the people, ex- 
ercise discipline over the clergy and monks, nor pro- 
hibit heathen rites.” (ibid., p. 402.) 

2. The influence of individual energy and personal 
character. ‘Around individuals penetrated with zeal 
and self-denial centres the life, nay, the very existence 
of the Churches of Europe. In the most troubled 
epochs of these troublous times, they alway appeared 
to do the work of their day and their generation.”. . . 
“Take away these men, blot out their influence, and 
how materially would events have varied! They had 
their defects, no one can deny—the defects of their 
day and their generation. We may question the wis- 
dom of many of the expedients to which they resorted; 
we may smile at much that savours of credulity and 
superstition; we may regret that at times they were 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 35 


induced to have recourse to ‘pious frauds’ in carrying 
out their work: the extreme asceticism of Columbanus, 
the policy of Augustine in dealing with the British 
bishops, the pertinacity of Wilfrid at the Council of 
Whitby, the devotion of every Anglo-Saxon mission- 
ary to the Roman see, all these, and many other points, 
may be regarded by us, in a very different age, as 
worthy of reprobation; but considering the circum- 
stances of the time in which they lived, it becomes us 
to speak kindly of men who hazarded their lives to 
hand down to us the blessings of civilisation.” (ibid., 
Pp. 403, 405 f.) 

3. The influence of the monasteries and the monastic 
orders in establishing centres of security and civilisa- 
tion on the ruins which the overthrow of the Roman 
Empire had left. “As from the gloom of these soli- 
tudes, a gloom so much in harmony with the worship 
of Thor and Woden, the new races, wild and wasteful, 
without prudence or forethought or steady industry, 
burst forth on the towns and cities of Southern Europe, 
according as internal wars or factions drove them forth 
to seek new homes, the question was, Who would seek 
them out? Who would brave all dangers in preaching 
to them the Word of Life? Who would settle down 
amongst them, improve their infant agriculture, and 
instil the first principles of civilisation? It was a mo- 
mentous question, but it was answered. Armed with 
none of the invention of modern industry and mechan- 
ical art, strong only in invisible protection, the Mon- 
astery sent forth its sons to carry light and life into 
these dark forests.” (ibid., p. 409.) “The missionary 
monk became the coloniser. The practised eye of men 
like Boniface or Sturmi sought out the proper site with 
heroic diligence, saw that it occupied a central posi- 


36 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


tion, that it possessed a fertile soil, that it was near 
some friendly watercourse. These points secured, the 
word was given; the trees were felled, the forest 
cleared, and the monastic buildings rose. Soon the 
voice of prayer was heard, and the mysterious chant 
and solemn litany awoke unwonted echoes in the forest 
glades. While some of the brethren educated the 
young, others copied manuscripts, or toiled over the 
illuminated missal, or transcribed a Gospel or an Epis- 
tle, others cultivated the soil, guided the plough, planted 
the apple-tree or the vine, arranged the bee-hives, 
erected the water-mill, opened the mine, and thus pre- 
sented to the eyes of men the kingdom of Christ, as 
that of One Who had redeemed the bodies no less than 
the souls of His creatures.” (ibid., p. 412). 

4. The organisation of churches with adequate 
superintendence, the education of a ministry and church 
synods which were the only bodies able and willing to 
deal with the needs of society. “We find them grap- 
pling with similar evils of their own day; with the 
Teutonic and Scandinavian custom of exposing weak 
and deformed children; with sacrifices of men and ani- 
mals in honour of the gods; with similar sacrifices at 
funerals; with witchcraft and sorcery of all kinds; we 
find them inculcating a due regard for the sacredness 
of human life, and the necessity for punitive justice 
and regular forms of law, in contradistinction to the 
low, unworthy notions which would condone all crimes, 
even murder, by pecuniary fines; we find them elevat- 
ing the peasant class, and striving to abolish slavery.” 
(ibid., p. 417.) 

5. The real effort, in plans at least, to give sound 
religious instruction. ‘The sermons of Boniface and 
the correspondence of Alcuin with Charlemagne in- 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 37 


dicate that some at least of the missionaries taught 
thoroughly. 

6. The absence of vernacular literature and espe- 
cially of translations of the Bible and the Liturgy. 
This was especially true of the missionaries in the 
West. “It never seems to have struck them, as it did 
Ulphilas, and Cyril, and Methodius, and other mission- 
aries of the Eastern Church, that one of the most im- 
portant requisites for permanent success was the in- 
troduction of the Scriptures and the Liturgy, or at least 
portions of both, in the vernacular language of their 
converts.” (ibid., p. 435.) 

7. The vigorous attacks of the missionaries upon 
heathen practices and sacred places. 


“Again and again we have seen them hewing down 
the images, profaning the temples, and protesting with 
vehemence against sorcery, witchcraft, and other heathen 
practices. The apostle of Ireland did not, as we saw, 
spare the great object of Celtic worship; his country- 
men, Columbanus and Gallus, provoked the grievous 
wrath of the Suevians by their hostility to Thor and 
Odin; Willibrord, at the peril of his life, polluted the 
sacred fountains of Fosites-land; Boniface risked not 
only personal safety but all his influence over the people 
of Hesse by hewing down the sacred oak of Geismar ; 
the address of Lebuin to the Saxon assembly did not 
betray one easily ‘shaken by the wind’; Bogoris flung 
away his idols at the first request of Methodius; Vladi- 
mir flogged the huge image of Peroun, and flung it into 
the waters of the Dnieper before the face of his people; 
Olaf and Thangbrand overthrew the monuments of 
Scandinavian idolatry with a zeal worthy of a Jehu; 
Bishop Otho in Pomerania insisted, in spite of imminent 
danger to himself, on destroying various Slavonic 
temples. As far as such external protests against 
idolatry could avail, their missionary zeal did not err on 
the side of laxity.” (ibid., p. 442). 


38 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


8. And yet, side by side with this, there was the 
greatest accommodation of Christianity to heathen 
worship and tradition. “The boundary line between 
the old and the new faith was not very sharply de- 
fined,” and “a continual interchange long went on be- 
tween Christian legends and heathen myths.” 

g. Lastly, as MacLear concludes—‘Whenever the 
Church effected anything real or lasting, it was when 
she was content to persevere in a spirit of absolute de- 
pendence on Him Who has promised to be with her 
‘always, even unto the end of the world’; when in the 
person of a Columba, a Boniface, a Sturmi, an Anskar, 
a Raymund Lull, she was content to go forth and sow 
the seed, and then leave it to do its work, remember- 
ing that if ‘earthly seed is long in springing up, im- 
perishable seed is longer still.’ Whenever she failed in 
her efforts, it was when she forgot in Whose strength 
she went forth, and for Whose glory alone she existed, 
when she was tempted to resort to other means and to 
try other expedients than those which her great Head 
had sanctioned, when instead of patiently leaving the 
good seed to grow of itself, she strove to hurry its de- 
velopment, and was impatient of small beginnings and 
weak instruments.” ( ibid., p. 450 f.) 

In one respect we have noted a superiority of the 
missions from the Eastern Church over the missions in 
the West. The former supplied the new Churches with 
a vernacular literature and translation of the Bible. 
The Western Church failed here and its failure lasted 
long after the Reformation. Pope Gregory VII in 
1080 declared that “as to a vernacular edition of the 
scriptures, that was impossible; it was not the will of 
God that the Sacred Word should be everywhere dis- 
played unless it should be held in contempt and give 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 39 


rise to error.” Five centuries later, at the Council of 
Trent, the same position was still maintained: “If any 
one shall have the temerity to read or possess (the 
Bible) without written permission he shall not receive 
absolution until he has first delivered up such Bible to 
the ordinary.” But in other respects the Western 
Church surpassed the Eastern. It was equipped with 
energies which in the conflict with Islam the Eastern 
Church showed that it lacked. It had worked out issues 
which the Eastern Church had slurred over. It had a 
firmer intellectual grip. Its form of Christianity was 
“more manly, rigid, moral.”’ It was more missionary. 
(von Schubert, “Outlines of Church History,” p. 151 

And yet in the time of the Reformation all foreign 
missionary effort had died down. Europe was nomi- 
nally Christian. The Moslem world had been let alone 
since the days of Raymund Lull. Asia was far away 
and Islam lay across the roads that led thither. Then 
came the discovery of the route around the Cape, a new 
door to Africa and Asia, and the unveiling of the new 
world. The Roman Catholic Church awoke at once to 
the new opportunities for foreign missions and in the 
sixteenth century the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the 
Franciscans, and others, poured out across the world 
with dauntless courage and tireless energy to found 
the Church in new lands and their enterprises are 
spread out to-day over the whole earth. 

The Protestant Churches were engrossed at first in 
a life and death struggle at home and it was two cen- 
turies or more before they really discerned the foreign 
missionary duty. In the interval, however, there were 
a number of isolated missionary undertakings—the ill- 
fated Huguenot settlements in Brazil in 1555 and in 


40 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Florida in 1565, the royal Swedish mission of Gustava 
Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus in Lapland at the end of 
the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth cen- 
turies, the Dutch missions in their colonies in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, the early missions of 
John Eliot and the Mayhews to the American Indians. 
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel is the 
oldest of our English-speaking foreign mission boards, 
founded in 1721 for the “religious instruction of the 
Queen’s subjects beyond the seas; for the maintenance 
of clergymen in the plantations, colonies, and factories 
of Great Britain; and for the propagation of the Gospel 
in those parts.” (Bliss, “A Concise History of Mis- 
sions,” p. 43.) 

In the middle of the seventeenth century a clearer 
conception of the missionary duty began to break in 
over the hard theological controversy which had fol- 
lowed the Reformation. Some laymen at Lubeck de- 
voted themselves to the missionary ideal and in 1664 an 
Austrian Protestant baron, Von Welz, issued two pub- 
lications calling for “a special association for the ex- 
tension of the evangelical religion and the conversion 
of the heathen. He propounded three questions: (1) 
Is it right that we, evangelical Christians, hold the 
Gospel for ourselves alone, and do not seek to spread 
it? (2) Is it right that we, evangelical Christians, 
spend so much on all sorts of dress, delicacies in eating 
and drinking, etc., but have hitherto thought of no 
means for the spread of the Gospel?” (ibid., p. 43 f.) 
Von Welz himself went out to Dutch Guiana. The 
missionary spirit now laid hold of the German Pietists, 
and growing out of these influences the Danish Tamil 
Mission was founded in 1705, by Zeigenbalg and 
Plutschau, which passed after more than a century of 


THROUGH THE CENTURIES 4I 


work into the hands of the Leipsic Society. The 
Moravians followed the Pietists and in 1732 began a 
mission in the Danish West Indies, and the following 
year in Greenland. After the Pietists and the Mora- 
vians came the Methodists. “In 1738, John Wesley 
visited Herrnhut, and was very much impressed with 
what he saw and heard; and in the subsequent work 
of the two brothers and their associate, Whitfield, the 
result of the influence of Zinzendorf and his teacher 
Francke was very manifest. With them, too, the effect 
was seen in an increasing desire for evangelization, but 
for some reason the evangelization did not take as wide 
a scope. It was still the colonial or home idea that 
dominated, not the conception of a world to be con- 
verted. It was not until 1786, when Thomas Coke, 
originally sent to Nova Scotia to preach Methodism 
among the English settlers, was driven by a storm to 
the West Indies and was brought face to face with the 
condition of the slaves, that the heathen world began to 
assume its proper place in the thought even of the Wes- 
leyans; and it was a quarter of a century later before 
their first real foreign mission was commenced in 
Africa.” (ibid., p. 49 f.) 

These were the preparations. We date the real be- 
ginning now from William Carey who went with John 
Thomas to India in 1793, under the Baptist Missionary 
Society of which Andrew Fuller was the inspiration. 
Carey called the Christian Church to a recovery of the 
foreign missionary conception and the Church re- 
sponded to the call. One by one the different Protes- 
tanfcommunions took up the task until to-day there is 
not one of them that does not recognise as part of its 
fundamental duty its proper share in the effort to carry 
the Gospel to the whole world. 


CHAPTER II 
Tue AIMS AND PURPOSES OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 


THE aim of foreign missions, in the form in which 
they have been carried on since Carey’s time, may be 
stated in the words of the Manual of one of our largest 
missionary societies : 


“The supreme and controlling aim of foreign missions 
is to make the Lord Jesus Christ known to all men as 
their Divine Saviour and to persuade them to become 
His disciples; to gather these disciples into Christian 
churches which shall be self-propagating, self-support- 
ing and self-governing ; to co-operate, so long as neces- 
sary, with these churches in the evangelising of their 
countrymen, and in bringing to bear on all human life 
the spirit and principles of Christ.” 


This statement is clear and definite and comprehen- 
sive but it leaves many questions to be considered and 
answered. | 

What is it “to make Christ known to the world?” 
The Moravian missionaries interpret the duty in the 
most direct and immediate terms. In the “Instructions 
for the members of the Unitas Fratrum, who Min- 
ister in the Gospel among the Heathen. London, 
1784,” section 20 reads: 


“Therefore, until the Brethren shall be able to ex- 
press themselves intelligently to the heathen, they 
must be contented with preaching by their walk and 
conversation only. Though the heathen may be 
brought to understand many things by signs—a way 

42 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 43 


of preaching which often makes a particular impres- 
sion, when words cannot be understood. 

“But when the Brethren shall have learned the 
language sufficiently to be understood, their testimony 
is to begin with Jesus Christ, describing Him as that 
great Lord, Who has all power in heaven and on earth, 
yea, as the Almighty God, Who made all things, and 
man in particular. They set forth His love to man to 
be so inexpressibly great, that He became Himself a 
man for our sake, to deliver us all from evil, and to 
make us happy here and hereafter. They testify to 
them at the same time, that He, out of love to man, 
endured even the most cruel death, and shed His blood, 
that we might obtain eternal life. They extol Him as 
the most kind, most benign and gracious Saviour, 
Whose heart’s delight is to do good unto men. Them- 
selves they represent as messengers sent by Him, to 
invite them, the heathen, to the enjoyment of all His 
blessings; and their labour aims only at gaining the 
hearts of the heathen for our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus 
they continue unweariedly preaching Christ and His 
sacrifice for us, until His gospel shall kindle a fire in 
their hearts, and bring them to faith in Jesus.” 


The following sections set forth that after the mis- 
sionaries have won the heathen for Christ then they 
are to tell them that our Lord Jesus Christ has a Father 
and are to explain God the Father to them, and that 
“when the word of Jesus Christ and His heavenly 
Father shall have taken hold of the hearts of the 
heathen,” then the Holy Spirit shall be explained to 
them. 

On the other hand the late Dr. Nevius, one of the 
ablest and wisest missionaries in China, maintained 
that the proper approach to the Chinese, at least, was to 
begin with God. He was opposed to the circulation of 
a Gospel like Mark, without any note or comment, be- 
cause he believed that its abrupt introduction, “The be- 


44 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


ginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God,” » 
at once created prejudice and misunderstanding which 
was unnecessary. Instead of making Christ known to 
the Chinese, this method, he held, obscured Him and 
obstructed the entrance of the Gospel. His method 
was to begin with God the Creator and Father, and to 
unfold His revelation in nature and in Christ. 

But whatever the method of approach or the form 
of statement, all Christian missions have been created 
by the sense of desire and duty to make the Gospel 
known to the world, and in one way or another have 
actually served the primary end of evangelisation. As 
Paul said of activities, of some of which he approved 
and of some of which he disapproved, ‘‘What then? 
Notwithstanding, every way Christ is preached and I 
therein do rejoice, yea and will rejoice.”” No imagina- 
tion can conceive the extent, diversity and persistence 
of this preaching of Christ and His Gospel in the for- 
eign mission enterprise. Ordained missionaries and 
native preachers have preached in chapel and house, in 
temple and shrine, by the wayside and in the city and 
village street. Men and women without ecclesiastical 
ordination, by the ten thousand, have told what they 
know of the Gospel in hospital and school and shop and 
house and wherever they had an opportunity to speak 
to other men and women. No doubt much of this 
preaching has been crude. The Taiping Rebellion 
shows how much earnest and sincere misrepresentation 
of the Gospel there has been. Nevertheless truth has 
gone abroad and great masses of men have heard of 
Christ and of these many have accepted the new hopes 
which the Gospel seemed to bring. 

In this work of direct evangelisation there are all the 
problems of the preaching of the Gospel which the 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 45 


Church has met throughout the centuries, complicated 
by new problems of language, antagonistic religions, 
and political organisations and issues. Some of these 
we shall consider in later chapters. Two of the more 
simple questions may be stated here. Can the Gospel 
be preached on the foreign field in the same evangelistic 
form to which we have been accustomed in the West? 
Is it wise to preach the Gospel indiscriminately to all 
classes and groups or is it better to select a superior 
class or group and let the Gospel work out from it? 
With regard to the first of these questions, it may be 
replied that the work of evangelisation need not be and 
never has been bound up to particular forms, either in 
medizeval or in modern missions, and that even in the 
Western Churches the modes of evangelisation of one 
day have differed from those of another. It need not 
concern us at all if our methods are inapplicable in 
Asia and Africa or if new methods never dreamed of 
by us emerge there. Nonetheless it is interesting to ob- 
serve that general evangelistic movements such as we 
have known in the West have been found natural and 
effective in Asia and that it is probable that we shall see 
them there in the future on a vastly greater scale. We 
may take one field for illustration. There has always 
been a steady emphasis upon evangelistic duty in the 
Churches in Japan and from time to time there have 
been notable special evangelistic efforts. Effective use 
has been made of the opportunities offered by exposi- 
tions. The Taikyo Dendo was a fruitful evangelistic 
campaign marking the beginning of the twentieth cen- 
tury, and fifteen years later the Churches throughout 
the country engaged generally in carrying forward a 
three years’ united campaign. The staff of workers 
was not large enough to make a simultaneous campaign 


46 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


possible and meetings, accordingly, were conducted in 
different sections of the country on a general consecu- 
tive plan. There was no difficulty in securing audiences 
of attentive and responsive people representing any 
level of society which was sought after. I attended a 
number of the meetings held in connection with this 
campaign in churches, tents and public halls. Almost 
invariably the meetings were crowded, the attention 
rapt, the people willing to sit and listen for hours, the 
newspaper reports full and sympathetic, and when ex- 
pressions were called for the response would be sur- 
prising. Great numbers expressed a purpose to follow 
Christ and much larger numbers a willingness to study 
the Gospel. There seemed to be no limitations upon 
this work except those which sprang from the few- 
ness of the qualified workers or from the inactivity or 
lukewarmness of those Christians who are not awake 
to their duty and the exceptional opportunities of the 
present time. It was interesting to note the opinions of 
the Japanese leaders with regard to it. They all spoke 
of the great gain which has come from co-operation 
of the different denominations. Mr. Imai, one of the 
effective preachers in the campaign, formerly a Bud- 
dhist priest, contrasted the unity of the Christians with 
“the chasms between the sects of Buddhism and of 
Shinto, neither of which could possibly carry on such a 
campaign.” ‘Men of the most different views,” said 
Mr. Uemura, “have been delighted to find that there 
was such joy in getting together.” “If ever in Japan 
a union Church should develop,” said Mr. Miyagawa, 
“historians will trace it to a natural, unpremeditated 
outgrowth of this campaign.”” Many Churches gained 
in membership and the Church of Christ in Japan 
rejoiced in the largest number of baptisms that it had 


AIMS AND PURPOSES > 47 


ever had, equalling ten per cent. of the total member- 
ship of the Church. The Japanese leaders, however, 
spoke earnestly of three great needs which the work of 
the campaign clearly revealed. (1) The first was the 
need of a more distinct utterance of the definite evan- 
gelical note. It is significant to have this emphasised, 
especially by Mr. Miyagawa, whose little book, “Christ 
and His Mission,’ dealing with the problem of the 
person of Christ, has called forth some criticism. 
Speaking with regard to the message of the campaign, 
Mr. Miyagawa publicly declared that, “There must be 
a far more vigorous, incisive presentation of the mean- 
ing of the cross and salvation in Christ.’’ To this end 
also it was felt that there was urgent need of the raising 
up of men with the gift of direct evangelistic persua- 
sion. (2) A second need was the lack of intensive 
personal work. Of this Mr. Uemura significantly said, 
“The big demonstrations and mass meetings have by 
no means been wasted. They are especially appro- 
priate during the first year but now we must bear down 
upon personal evangelism and the thorough nurture of 
seekers. In this we must seek the aid of the mis- 
sionaries more than in the past. Doubtless it is the 
fault of us Japanese leaders that the missionaries have 
not been sufficiently prominent as speakers and workers. 
I earnestly hope that missionaries will not only be given 
an opportunity but will press forward without being 
asked.” ‘“‘The campaign,” said Bishop Hiraiwa of 
the Methodist Church, “has shown that our pastors 
have to be trained totrain. They do not yet know how 
to nurse into healthy life and to guide on to maturity 
the inquirers who come to them. As a result in the 
majority of local churches not more than one-tenth of 
the persons whose signed cards were handed to the 


48 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


pastors have come into church membership.” With 
this same thought in mind Mr. Uemura urged, “that 
first and last, what is needed is a larger number of 
strong men, especially in the ministry. Even in the 
cities the churches are often poorly manned and it is 
still worse in the country. We need to raise the 
standard of ministerial candidates and get more men in 
our seminaries with the physique and force and ability 
of the picked men in the government colleges. Theo- 
logical school students should be more carefully selected 
and not over urged to enter. They should be put 
through a physical examination and not spoiled by 
scholarship aid. Let us pray for men, for the harvest 
is waiting.” (3) This need of prayer was emphasised 
by the Japanese leaders as the third great need. ‘There 
is one deep conviction which the last few months have 
brought,” said Mr. Miyagawa, “Man’s wisdom cannot 
open hearts nor save souls. Only as we bow before the 
heavenly Father and pray for spiritual power to con- 
vince the audience and comfort the inquirers can hearts 
be won to Christ. Whatever results have been 
achieved have come from prevailing prayer.” 

Two aspects of the campaign were emphasised by 
the missionaries in addition to these points of which 
the Japanese leaders speak. One of these was the 
activity of the laymen. As Dr. Fulton says, “The lay 
element in the Church has brought to the front both 
men and women. The call upon them as speakers has 
given them a new sense of responsibility, and the 
healthful criticism which has been received in some 
cases for failing to utter a clear and positive gospel will 
not be lost upon them.” In the second place the cam- 
paign helped to reveal the growing realisation of the 
country that the old religious forces are inadequate to 


AIMS AND PURPOSES | 49 


meet the needs of the nation or of human life. Ata 
banquet of prominent men entertained at the Imperial 
hotel in Tokyo by the evangelistic committee, Count 
Okuma, whose kinship with Christian ideals was per- 
haps overestimated, in reviewing the half century of 
modern Christian work in Japan; “not only acknowl- 
edged the large contribution made to the betterment of 
society but frankly stated his own convictions that no 
practical solution of many pressing problems was in 
sight apart from Christianity.”” In his comments on 
the campaign the Rev. Harper H. Coates of Tokyo 
stated, ‘““The monotheistic trend hitherto kept in the 
background of Japanese thought is gradually finding 
expression among thinkers of light and leading and 
cannot fail in time to land men in the Christian 
Church.” Even Abbot Kosui, the recent head of the 
Hongwanji sect of Buddhism, said in a statement 
widely quoted among the people, “Buddhism in Japan 
as well as in India and China is doomed to ultimate 
destruction, for it is out of touch with life.” 

The second typical evangelistic question which we 
have suggested is illustrated in the low caste movement 
in India. Much of the early missionary work in India 
was directed to high caste people. The educational 
work then and since has been maintained as an agency 
of access and influence among the upper castes. During 
the past thirty years, however, the missions discovered a 
great door of opportunity among the lower or more 
accurately, the outcaste people, approximately 50,- 
000,000, who have in the past been outside the pale of 
Indian social life. They were an untouchable, un- 
privileged mass of humanity dropped through the bot- 
tom of human life. Christian missions went to them. 
They heard in Christianity a new message of hope, and 


50 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


as a result tens of thousands of these ignorant but still 
aspiring people have been baptised into the Christian 
Church. The movement has its grave problems and 
some of these are stated in the “Memorandum” of the 
Christo Samaj, issued in 1920, and representing the 
views of some of the ablest of the Indian Christian 
leaders in South India: 


“We find serious drawbacks and mistakes in con- 
nection with the way in which whole villages and 
families have been and are being brought into the 
Christian Church. We raise no serious objection on 
the score that these mass movements are from the 
lower classes ; for the Gospel should indeed be preached 
to the poor. But we perceive questionable motives 
mixed up in the mass movement phenomena, which have 
led to serious complications in the Christian organism. 
It is to the social and material aspirations of the lower 
classes that the method has largely appealed and the 
spiritual motive is not given the emphasis and pre- 
eminence that it always should claim. It is openly 
avowed that persons without a real perception of Chris- 
tianity are admitted into the Christian fold in anticipa- 
tion of the spiritual benefits that might result to their 
children or succeeding generations. While we seriously 
question even such a result, we submit emphatically 
this is a fatal error in the building up of the Church, 
which was intended to be an assembly of those who have 
deliberately given themselves to the lordship of Christ. 
Also it does little justice to the inherent religious 
capacity of the lower classes attested by their past 
history, and does permanent harm to Indian Christianity 
by establishing a low standard of spirituality in the 
Indian Church. This low standard of spiritual life is 
one of the chief stumbling blocks to the true expansion 
of Christianity in the land; for converts of a higher 
order who have accepted Christianity through higher 
motives could hardly find their spiritual home in the 
Christian community as it is at present composed, with 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 51 


the result that they either succumb to the prevailing 
standard of the community or go out of the Christian 
community or remain as unbaptized Christians outside. 
Mass movements have also reproduced the caste 
divisions inside the Christian Church and have, we are 
afraid, forever committed Christianity to development 
on caste lines. They have given the lie to the hopes 
held out by Christian missionaries in the past of Chris- 
tianity proving the most effective force in the formation 
of an Indian nation. We are therefore even forced to 
disown the Christian community as not being a creation 
of the spirit of Christ, and would differentiate between 
this community and the true Christian Church, which 
should consist of true followers of Christ. Such 
methods of enlarging the Christian Church have been 
followed in the West, and such nominal Christianity 
does exist in the West. But that is no sufficient reason 
for perpetuating them here, where the Christian Church 
is yet in its initial stages with its task of evangelisation 
still largely before it. This drawback comes to the 
forefront especially at the present juncture in India, 
where the struggle between Christianity and Hinduism 
clearly lies in the spiritual realm. That the large acces- 
sion to the Christian Churches from these classes is a 
drag on the wheels of progress becomes apparent. 
Whenever any desirable reform is proposed, the mis- 
sions that are responsible for these movements at once 
point out that it is only a small section that would 
countenance the change, and that the less developed 
Christians are averse to it. Thus, by continual ex- 
pansion of the Churches by the inflow of mere numbers, 
their period of tutelage and subordination can be 
indefinitely postponed, and it is even contended that 
these lower classes cannot be entrusted to their more 
educated brethren, and that the missionary alone can 
hold the scales even between the two parties.” 


Some of the discussions of this question which one 
hears in India lead him to ask whether if those speak- 
ing had had matters in their own hands there ever 


52 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


would have been any mass movement at all, or whether 
if they could have their way now the movement would 
be allowed any further development. But the teaching 
of our Lord and the history of the Christian Church in 
the New Testament, in the centuries of the expansion 
of the Church, in the Reformation, in the best activities 
of the Roman Catholic Church; the institution of the 
human family with the principles and processes of its 
unequalled power; the laws of life and progress in 
institutions and in society are all against too tight and 
hampering an attitude with regard to the providence of 
God in the founding of His Church. One can sym- 
pathise deeply with the individualistic and selective view 
expressed in the quotation from the Memorandum of 
the Christo Samaj, and yet one cannot but believe that 
in the long run we shall see that this mass movement 
with all its problems and difficulties was and is of God’s 
will. Only we should seek to make fewer mistakes than 
we have made and should certainly look with restive- 
ness and discontent upon our present failure to make 
all that should be made out of this opportunity. There 
are those who believe that only Indian Christians of the 
higher castes could use this opportunity to the full. It 
would be a tragic thing if leaders of the Indian Church 
from the better castes were led to terminate or to op- 
pose a movement which they might not only save from 
mistake and loss, but by which it might be the will of 
God through them to save India. 

Apart from these questions and many more which 
are involved in the distinctive evangelistic aims of 
missions, there is the problem of relating evangelisation 
to the other elements in the statement of the broad pur- 
pose of missions which was quoted at the beginning of 
this chapter. This statement binds together in one, 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 53 


two aims which are sometimes separated, and which 
are well stated in a very suggestive little book entitled, 
“Mission Problems in Japan.” 


“TI. The end of mission work in any country should 
be to raise up a native Church, with an efficient organ- 
isation, a sound theology, and a- consecrated and able 
ministry. When this is accomplished the work of the 
missionary is done. The unevangelised portion of the 
nation, however great, may and should be left to the 
care of the native Church. The Churches in America 
might still need to assist the native organisations with 
funds; but as soon as an efficient native Church is 
established, as defined above, the work of the missionary 
body is over, and they should therefore be withdrawn. 

“II. The aim of the foreign missionaries to any 
country should be to evangelise that country, i.e., to 
cause, if not all, then at any rate the larger part of its 
inhabitants to know the truth. The establishment and 
organisation of a native Church is a means, and the 
most important one, to that end, but it is not in itself an 
end. As the missionaries have a work to perform be- 
fore the organisation of the native Church, so they have 
a work after it has attained such a degree of efficiency 
that it no longer needs their superintendence. Their 
work is then to press on the evangelisation of the mass 
of the people, a work that is never finished so long as a 
large part of the people are lying in heathen darkness.” 


These two aims are not separate and antagonistic. 
They belong together. To evangelise it is not enough 
that missionaries should preach the Gospel. As 
Professor William Adams Brown said, in a report on 
“Modern Missions in the Far East’: 


“We must raise up a native ministry, create a Chris- 
tian literature in the vernacular ; plant institutions which 
shall have for each of the countries in which they are 
established the same power of self-propagation which 
is characteristic of the churches of the homeland. 


54. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


“This is a work which cannot be done by foreigners. © 
They may lay the foundation, but the building itself 
must be the work of native Christians interpreting 
Christianity to their fellow-countrymen in terms of 
their own speech and habits of thought. It is one of 
the most encouraging features of the present situation 
that this is so generally recognised by missionaries, and 
that the progress of the mission cause is being more 
and more judged by this standard. 

“What then does it mean to create a native Church? 
Clearly not simply to gather congregations of native 
Christians and to raise up a native ministry to preach 
to them. It means to bring into existence in each 
country of the world a Christian community with an 
independent self-consciousness, self-supporting, self- 
governing and self-propagating.”’ 


When we conceive this Christian community in terms 
of a Church, as missions have always done and must 
inevitably do, a host of new questions emerges. What 
is the Christian Church? What are its essential marks? 
What are its real functions? And consideration of 
these questions will bring out, of course, the differences 
of view, some of them superficial and some of them 
very deep, which prevail with regard to the true defini- 
tion of the Church. The leaders of the Churches on the 
mission fields will have to face these differences and 
sooner or later answer these questions as best they can 
for themselves. They may decide to carry on the 
traditions which they have received or to pursue some 
new composite or original road. We can only pray 
that they may be led aright. 

The aim of foreign missions clearly is to plant 
Christianity indigenously in the life of each nation, to 
domesticate it there and let it grow up and out in the 
forms of life appropriate to it in the new environment 
to which it has been naturalised, to which, indeed, it has 


AIMS AND PURPOSES) 55 


not needed to be naturalised so far as it has been 
presented in its true character as the universal life and 
faith of man. So far as we succeed in carrying out this 
aim, we build up in each nation, or we are witnesses to 
a building up by God of Churches rooted in the life of 
each separate nation, each one made up of its nation’s 
people, subject to its distinctive character and partici- 
pating in its national mission and destiny. Our very 
fundamental ideal in foreign missions involves the 
creation of the national problem, the problem of the 
relation of national Churches, or of Churches which 
are to become national. The ideal of the Roman 
Church is to subject all Churches everywhere to the 
Roman tradition, the Roman theory, and the Roman 
government. 

This is not our ideal. Our ideal is to establish in 
each land a. native Church that shall be of the soil, 
rooted in the tradition and life of the people, fitted to 
its customs and institutions, sharing its character and 
participating in its mission, yes, defining and inspiring 
that mission as it can do only when it is a truly national 
Church subject to no alien bondage. In such a Church, 
Christianity will, of course, surrender nothing that is 
essential and universal. She enters into no compromise. 
She simply domesticates herself in a new home which 
she has been long in finding, and from the new roots 
which she sinks into humanity expands that interpreta- 
tion of the life of God in man and nourishes that hope 
of man’s future in God, which can only be perfected 
as all the people bring their glory and honour into the 
final temple of humanity. 

Just as Boards and Missions exist for the sake of 
the individual missionary, so his end is found in estab- 
lishing and assisting a living native Church. I use the 


56 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


word “native” without hesitation. It is a current 
fashion in missionary literature to eschew it on the 
ground that it is a reproachful term. What makes it 
reproachful? Not its history. It is a good and honest 
word, one of the best and honestest words in the 
English language. If it has been tainted by any condi- 
tions existing in the mission work, the right course is 
to change the conditions and not to allow a noble word 
to be degraded. So long as the conditions exist they 
will taint any other word that may be substituted for it. 
They will taint “indigenous” faster than they tainted 
“native.” They will taint “Church” as they are al- 
ready beginning to do. They will even taint the word 
“Christian.” What needs to be changed is not the 
good word “native” but the facts of dependence and 
subservience in the native Church. It is desirable that 
there should be clear thinking and straight speaking in 
this matter, because there is danger that in some coun- 
tries the mission enterprise will be led into a morass 
in which both Missions and Churches will be bogged 
to their detriment and confusion. 

The supreme and determining aim of missions in 
any country, India for example, is to get Jesus Christ 
made known and accepted in India. Elemental to this 
aim is the establishment of a Christian Church in 
India, but the establishment of the Church in any land 
is not a matter of terminology. It is a matter of fact. 
And a Church that is a Church in fact and not merely 
in term will be self-dependent, self-governed, and most 
of all a force of living and spontaneous propaganda. 
I do not say that it must be. I simply say that it will 
be. To give up the idea of financial self-dependence is 
to accept the fact of dependence, and that fact, no mat- 
ter how it may be obscured by mergers or by agree- 


AIMS AND PURPOSES | 57 


ments, will keep the Church, so long as it remains a 
fact, from fulfilling its functions or wielding its power. 
The spirit of race superiority on the part of missions in 
whatever way it displays itself, in temper or in policy, 
as to money, relationships, or anything else, is a bane- 
ful thing, a barrier to be overcome in the effort to plant 
and develop an efficient and sovereign native Church. 
But the fact of financial dependence is a barrier also, 
and the Indian Church ought resolutely to set itself 
to overcome that barrier. Until it does do so, no sub- 
ordination of missionaries to it nor any merging of 
missions with it will make it independent or set it in its 
rightful place of national religious leadership. 

What then are the elements which must enter into 
the ideal of the indigenous Church? 

1. That it should be the Church of Christ, that He 
should be its Head, in the fulness of the fact and con- 
ception of Him and His Headship set forth in the New 
Testament. It will be exclusive in the sense that He 
is the only Saviour and Lord. It will be inclusive in 
the sense that He is all in all, and Head of all both 
present and past, and that by Him all things consist. 
All the wealth and truth of the inheritance and experi- 
ence of the nation is His. 

2. That it should be a living, propagating power, so 
possessing Christ and possessed by Him that its spon- 
taneous and irresistible instinct shall be to make Christ 
known to all men and to make Christ Lord of all things. 
(See Frederic Myers, “Catholic Thoughts on the 
Church of Christ and the Church of England.’’) 

3. That it should be self-governing and self-support- 
ing. This does not mean that it may not accept counsel 
and help. It does mean that it does not rely upon them 
and that it can do without them. 


58 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


4. That it should be national and free. This means 
that it should be independent of foreign control and 
authority, though it may have what relations of inter- 
national fellowship it thinks wise. It means that it 
will have the colour and flavour of the national char- 
acter and will be fitted to the genius of the race. It 
means that so far as any external authority is con- 
cerned the Church will have absolute freedom of 
thought and life. 

5. That it should be a part of that Church which 
lives from age to age and which is above all nations and 
races, and that it should be consciously and vitally and 
truly in line with the full Christian heritage. This 
means that it must know the Church of history as well 
as the Christ of history. 

6. That it should know what the Church of the past 
has been through in the matter of faith and order, but 
be free on the basis of the New Testament and the 
history of the Church and its own living experience to 
work out its own credal statements and ecclesiastical 
organisation. 

7. That it should be a living organism built of those 
living cells which are essential to all organic life. This 
means that it should function in and through efficient 
congregational units. An argument can be made for a 
new form of Christianity which would dispense with 
local church organisations, with the sacraments and the 
discipline and education and fellowship of local 
churches. But it is a purely theoretical and fallacious 
argument. “If men are to make a thing living,” says 
Mr. Chesterton, “they must make it local.” “For a 
long time past,” wrote Hort, “I have been coming in 
various ways to feel that perhaps our most urgent need 
in the English Church is the creation of a true con- 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 59 


gregational life. . . . A new congregational life would 
give back to Christianity itself a power of which people 
little dream.” 

8. That it should fearlessly grapple in the spirit of 
Christ with all the problems of life and society, or, to 
put it in more Christian terms, that it should seek to 
serve both individual persons and society as a whole in 
all the ways in which men of righteousness and truth 
and courage can serve in Christ’s name their fellow 
men and their age. 

g. That it should teach and live the Gospel and that 
it should conceive and represent Christianity not as a 
Western system to be modified but as the ideal truth of 
God revealed in Christ after which all national 
Churches are striving. 

The essential thing about these new Churches is that 
they should be real. Life and witness will be the first 
evidence of this reality, but also if these Churches are 
real they will be independent. No one will make them 
independent. No one can. They will simply be so. 
And we gain nothing by slurring the importance of this. 
One of the essentials of a real Church is financial self- 
dependence. There has been and is real danger in 
India, that this element in the ideal and character of a 
Church may be slurred over. “I am sick,” writes one 
Indian Christian, ‘of hearing self-support, self-support 
on all sides. Self-respect, self-government, self-propa- 
gation always precede self-support. Self-support should 
never be the initial step. It is a blessing that comes of 
itself without the present straining of nerves and pound- 
ing the pulpits with self-support sermons.” (The 
National Missionary Intelligencer, August, 1921; p. 84.) 
“With regard to money contributed by Churches in the 
West for the evangelisation of India,” says an appeal 


60 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


signed by South Indian missionaries and Indian Chris- 
tians, “the chief question is not by whom the money 
is administered, but whether it is spent in the most 
fruitful way for the extension of Christ’s kingdom. 
The principle that a body because it contributes money 
must have a voice in the spending of it, should not 
operate in the Church of Christ.” (Christian Patriot, 
June 8, 1918.) “Let the doctrine of he who pays the 
piper has the right to call for the tune be decently 
buried.” (‘““Memorandum” of the Christo Samaj, p. 
20.) Asa reaction against wrong views on the other 
side and the use of missionary money as a basis for 
missionary influence and authority, there is much that 
is wholesome in this emphasis, but, while the native 
Church may properly resent the idea that foreign funds 
entitle foreign Missions to control the Church, it must 
not shut its eyes to the hard fact which does not grow 
out of missionary obstinacy and domination, but rests 
on true psychology, true economy and true history, that 
the Church must be financially self-dependent. That 
does not mean that it may not receive financial help 
from without. The American Church is intellectually 
independent and spiritually independent, but it is draw- 
ing all the time upon the churches of Great-Britain for 
intellectual and spiritual help, and it is even more in- 
debted for spiritual help to its foreign missions and 
their work in foreign lands. But the principle to which 
I am referring does require relentlessly, and the native 
Church will never be able to escape from it, that that 
Church should set for itself the goal of complete self- 
support and should go a great deal further at once 
towards the achievement of that goal than it has gone. 
There are those in the missions and the native 
Churches who see this clearly. ‘Mr. ——,” writes the 





AIMS AND PURPOSES 61 


Rey. Bernard Lucas, in an article entitled “The Indian 
Church and Indian Leadership,” “would relegate to a 
quite subordinate position the financial aspect of the 
question, and, ignoring the source from which the 
funds are obtained, would use the funds of the Home 
Church for the support of Indian missionaries, who 
as regards status and salary would be very much 
superior to their ministerial brethren. I would put the 
financial aspect of the question in the forefront, and 
make the Indian Church funds the controlling factor 
in the matter of salary, and the Indian Church organ- 
isation the supreme sphere in the matter of position and 
influence. The goal which must, in my judgment, 
regulate the whole missionary policy is the substitution, 
not of Indian for European missionaries, but of the 
Indian Church with its own ministerial and mission 
service, for the Home Church with its foreign mis- 
sionaries and its foreign-supported workers.” (“The 
Harvest Field,’ November, 1917, p. 423.) And the 
Rev. Andrew Thakur Das, in a paper on the “New 
Day in the Indian Church,” writes: “While it is be- 
coming clear that Christianity is to be naturalised in 
India, it is not easy to depict and define its future 
forms and features. We have not, as a community, 
fully set ourselves to this task. It is easy, however, 
to see the steep path which will lead us to the goal. 
An indigenous Church has to be an independent and 
self-sustained Church. Undoubtedly one of the keys 
of this situation is an Indian ministry. As long as the 
Indian agents are dependent on foreign funds and sub- 
ject to foreign control, so long it will be impossible 
for the Indian Church to take a vigorous step forward 
towards this ideal. Foreign support and control are 
apt to act as narcotics, and check the spontaneous 


62 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


development of Indian Christianity. A mission-paid 
ministry tends to create a barrier between the minister 
and his people, by bringing him more into touch with 
the foreigner than with those whom he serves, and 
makes him responsible not to the Church, but to the 
Foreign Mission which supplies the money. The 
situation becomes very serious when we consider that, 
while on the one hand foreign pay-mastership is dead- 
ening, on the other hand Indian congregations are not 
rich enough to support suitable ministers. It may be 
possible for Missionary Societies to continue payment 
without exercising control, but it will damp Indian self- 
respect and advance.” ‘What we have to do,” Mr. 
Thakur Das says, “is to keep steadily before our eyes 
the necessary goal of replacing foreign money, foreign 
men, and foreign administration by Indian money, 
Indian men, and Indian administration.” 

Nothing has more notably characterised the Church 
in Japan than its sturdy financial independence, and 
nothing helped more to accomplish the results which 
the Churches in Japan have achieved than the example 
of men like Paul Sawayama, who not in a spirit of 
bitterness or separatism, or resentment against the 
foreign missions, but in the spirit of love and co-opera- 
tion and for the sake of the life of the Japanese 
Church and for the sake of the evangelisation of Japan 
undertook, at great self-sacrifice and perhaps at the 
cost of his life, the responsibility of leadership in estab- 
lishing both evangelistic and educational work in Japan 
on a purely Japanese and absolutely self-supporting 
basis. It would undoubtedly be a great help in India if 
men would come forward, with the courage described 
in the Memorandum of the Christo Samaj and with 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 63 


Sawayama’s spirit, to found and carry forward purely 
indigenous and self-supporting activities. All who long 
for this will pray that such undertakings as that of the 
hospital and brotherhood at Tirupatter may meet with 
great success and be the forerunners of many such 
agencies in India. (“National Missionary Intelli- 
gencer,” April, 1921.) 

It should be said again that this insistence upon the 
self-dependence of the Church is not an obstinate 
prejudice of the missions nor the attempt to use the 
money help of the Western Churches as a condition of 
authority. The Boards and missions are eager to have 
the native churches take up and exercise all the power 
that they can. It is in their own best interest that one 
desires to see the Churches filled with a keen con- 
sciousness as to the inevitable connection between self- 
respect, self-administration and self-dependence. 

It is surprising and yet natural that the Churches 
which have been established on the mission field have 
had so little trouble in the matter of their credal state- 
ments. It is surprising when we think of the diffi- 
culties experienced in the West, and when we remember 
the composite elements which have entered into these 
new Churches. On the other hand all were busy with 
the direct work of extending the boundaries of the 
Church. There was present the saving power of a 
great and loyal evangelistic momentum. The issue was 
the fundamental one between Christ and paganism. 
Also it must be added, these creeds are as yet not 
original contributions out of new experience of the 
Gospel but amplifications and adaptations of Western 
formularies. It may be of interest to cite two of these. 
This is the creed of the Church of Christ in Japan: 


62 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


development of Indian Christianity. A mission-paid 
ministry tends to create a barrier between the minister 
and his people, by bringing him more into touch with 
the foreigner than with those whom he serves, and 
makes him responsible not to the Church, but to the 
Foreign Mission which supplies the money. The 
situation becomes very serious when we consider that, 
while on the one hand foreign pay-mastership is dead- 
ening, on the other hand Indian congregations are not 
rich enough to support suitable ministers. It may be 
possible for Missionary Societies to continue payment 
without exercising control, but it will damp Indian self- 
respect and advance.”’ ‘What we have to do,” Mr. 
Thakur Das says, “is to keep steadily before our eyes 
the necessary goal of replacing foreign money, foreign 
men, and foreign administration by Indian money, 
Indian men, and Indian administration.” 

Nothing has more notably characterised the Church 
in Japan than its sturdy financial independence, and 
nothing helped more to accomplish the results which 
the Churches in Japan have achieved than the example 
of men like Paul Sawayama, who not in a spirit of 
bitterness or separatism, or resentment against the 
foreign missions, but in the spirit of love and co-opera- 
tion and for the sake of the life of the Japanese 
Church and for the sake of the evangelisation of Japan 
undertook, at great self-sacrifice and perhaps at the 
cost of his life, the responsibility of leadership in estab- 
lishing both evangelistic and educational work in Japan 
on a purely Japanese and absolutely self-supporting 
basis. It would undoubtedly be a great help in India if 
men would come forward, with the courage described 
in the Memorandum of the Christo Samaj and with 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 63 


Sawayama’s spirit, to found and carry forward purely 
indigenous and self-supporting activities. All who long 
for this will pray that such undertakings as that of the 
hospital and brotherhood at Tirupatter may meet with 
great success and be the forerunners of many such 
agencies in India. (“National Missionary Intelli- 
gencer,” April, 1921.) 

It should be said again that this insistence upon the 
self-dependence of the Church is not an obstinate 
prejudice of the missions nor the attempt to use the 
money help of the Western Churches as a condition of 
authority. The Boards and missions are eager to have 
the native churches take up and exercise all the power 
that they can. It is in their own best interest that one 
desires to see the Churches filled with a keen con- 
sciousness as to the inevitable connection between self- 
respect, self-administration and self-dependence. | 

It is surprising and yet natural that the Churches 
which have been established on the mission field have 
had so little trouble in the matter of their credal state- 
ments. It is surprising when we think of the diffi- 
culties experienced in the West, and when we remember 
the composite elements which have entered into these 
new Churches. On the other hand all were busy with 
the direct work of extending the boundaries of the 
Church. There was present the saving power of a 
great and loyal evangelistic momentum. ‘The issue was 
the fundamental one between Christ and paganism. 
Also it must be added, these creeds are as yet not 
original contributions out of new experience of the 
Gospel but amplifications and adaptations of Western 
formularies. It may be of interest to cite two of these. 
This is the creed of the Church of Christ in Japan: 


66 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


against God’s good and holy law, and that out of this 
condition no man is able to deliver himself. 
(6) OF THE GRACE OF GoD: 

We believe that God out of His great love for the 
world, has given His only begotten Son to be the 
Saviour of sinners, and in the Gospel freely offers His 
all-sufficient salvation to all men. 

(7) OF THE Lorp Jesus CuRIsT: 

We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal 
Son of God: Who for us men and for our salvation 
was conceived of the Holy Spirit, became man, yet 
without sin, the only true Incarnation of God; He 
through His word and through His perfect obedience 
did reveal the Father ; and by His life, death and resur- 
rection did establish the way by which men may obtain 
forgiveness of sin and the gift of eternal life; He 
ascended into heaven where He ever liveth to make in- 
tercession for us. 

(8) Or THE Hoty Spirit: 

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of 
Life, Who moves upon the hearts of men to restrain 
them from evil and to turn them unto good, to convict 
the world of sin, to enlighten men’s minds in the 
knowledge of Christ, and to persuade and enable them 
to obey the call of the Gospel; He abides with the 
Church, dwelling in every believer as the spirit of truth, 
of holiness, of comfort and of love. 

(9) OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE: 

We believe that, being born again by the spirit of 
God, we become new creatures in Christ Jesus, trusting 
in Him alone for our salvation, confessing and for- 
saking our sins, with a sincere purpose to do the will of 
God; we believe that God pardons our sins on the 
ground of perfect obedience and sacrifice of Christ and 
that we are adopted as sons of God and grow into the 
likeness of Christ through fellowship with Him and the 
indwelling of the Holy Spirit. 

(10) Or THE CHURCH: 

We acknowledge one holy catholic Church, the in- 
numerable company of saints of every age and nation, 
who being united by the Holy Spirit to Christ their 


- AIMS AND PURPOSES 67 


Head, are one body in Him, and have communion with 
their Lord and with one another. Further we receive 
it as the Will of Christ that His Church on earth should 
exist as a visible and sacred brotherhood, consisting of 
those who profess faith in Jesus. Christ and obedience 
unto Him, and organised for the confession of His 
name, for the public worship of God, for the admin- 
istration of the sacraments, for the upbuilding of be- 
lievers, for the universal propagation of the Gospel and 
for the service of man, and we acknowledge as a part of 
this universal brotherhood every church throughout the 
world which professes this faith in Jesus Christ and 
obedience to Him as Divine Lord and Saviour. 

(11) OF THE SACRAMENTS: 

We believe that our Lord instituted the Sacraments 
of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Baptism is a sign 
and seal of our union with Christ and our renewal by 
the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Supper is a memorial of 
Christ’s death and is a means of grace to those who 
partake in faith, and is to be observed by His people 
till He comes. 

(12) Or THE RESURRECTION AND JUDGMENT: 

We believe in the resurrection of the dead, both of 
the just and the unjust, and that Christ shall judge the 
living and the dead; who shall come forth, they that 
have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they 
that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment.” 


On the basis of such simple doctrinal standards as 
these all the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches at 
work in Japan have united in co-operation with the 
Church of Christ, and in India not only the Presby- 
terian and Reformed Missions with one exception, but 
the Congregational Missions as well have united in 
combining their fruitage in the United Church of India. 
Indeed, throughout the mission field the spirit of co- 
operation and comity has in general governed the re- 
lations of all the evangelical Churches. 


68 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


A great deal is made, nevertheless, by critics of 
foreign missions of the folly and wickedness of 
the Western Churches in extending their denomina- 
tionalism to the foreign fields. In a measure the critics 
are right. Our denominations grew up from historic 
antecedents which are intelligible to us, and those who 
adhere to each denomination are able to justify it in 
their own view. There are many of us who have no 
such ingenuity, and who see no reason for the mainte- 
nance of so many denominations, and little for the 
maintenance of the half-dozen bodies into which it may 
be hoped that the present multitude of denominations 
will soon coalesce, except the reason that may be found 
in temperamental differences and in the administrative 
effectiveness due to having a few separate divisions of 
what is yet one army. But there is no reason for ex- 
porting to Asia our Occidental lines of cleavage. There 
surely Christianity should be introduced in such simple 
and essential forms as to make one common Church 
possible, undivided by our western sectarianism. 

And the critics are not only right in this principle, 
that we ought not to inflict our denominationalism on 
the mission field, but they have a little justification of 
their charge that this has sometimes been done. There 
have been instances where two Churches have occupied 
a field which should have been left to one, where new 
native Churches have been seriously disturbed in their 
development by imitation of western models, and where 
one body or another of western missionaries has re- 
fused to participate in union movements which would 
have tended to obscure or to eliminate the lines of 
western denominationalism. 

But the critics make far too much of what few facts 
of this sort there are. As a matter of fact, there is such 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 69 


inconsiderable rivalry on the mission field that it can 
be almost ignored. Instead of conflict and competition, 
there is real, even if not perfect, harmony and the 
closest co-operation. 

And the union movements are not only among 
cognate bodies. In Shantung Province in China, the 
English Baptists and American Presbyterians have 
joined in one university, including a theological school 
where the preachers for the two missions are trained 
together, and the English and American Congrega- 
tionalists and the American Methodists and Presby- 
terians have united in a similar theological institution in 
Peking. In other fields there are boards of reference, 
permanent committees on co-operation, or other pro- 
visions for unity of effort; and pages could be filled 
with the resolutions and agreements of missionary con- 
ferences in many fields regarding missionary comity 
and co-operation. The critics have little idea how large 
is the measure of unity already attained abroad, and 
how relatively small is the friction and overlapping. 
The critics are far surpassed in their zeal for unity and 
goodwill by the Christian missionaries who are doing 
the work of establishing the Church in Asia and the 
rest of the non-Christian world. 

But the critics say: “In spite of all this, it is true 
that the various Churches are projecting themselves 
over the world, and the poor heathen are hopelessly 
confused by the diverse and perplexing forms in which 
Christianity presents itself to them. They are used to 
simplicity and unity, and they are asked to accept a 
new religion which presents itself in twenty different 
forms.” Lord Curzon said all this in the trite and 
stale way common to all superficial examiners of mis- 
sions in Asia. Speaking of Japan especially, he said: 


70 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


“When Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Evan- 
gelicals, Lutherans, Church of England, Methodists, 
Reformed, Russian Orthodox, Quakers, Unitarians, 
and Universalists appear simultaneously upon the scene, 
each claiming to hold the keys of heaven in their hand, 
it cannot be thought surprising if the Japanese, who 
have hardly made up their minds that they want a 
heaven at all, are somewhat bewildered by the multi- 
plicity of volunteer doorkeepers.” 

In reply to this it should be said, first of all, that it 
is for the most part sheer nonsense. In most mission 
fields there are no denominations at all. Each separate 
church has its own district. The countries are so large, 
and the population so immense, that each mission works 
for different sections of people, and it goes to these 
people, not as a mission of a particular denomination, 
but as an expression of the great Church of Christ, and 
of what is common to all branches of it. The Presby- 
terian converts in Persia do not know that they are 
Presbyterians. The Baptist converts in India only 
know that they are Christians. In most cases no 
denominational titles have been translated or invented. 
And if Lord Curzon had examined the native Christians 
as to what denominations had baptised and enrolled 
them, he would have discovered that most of them did 
not know. They only know that they are Christians. 
Get all the native Christians of Shanghai together, and 
you will find that the denominational distinctions are 
completely lost sight of. I attended a Christian En- 
deavour convention there once, and the missionary 
critic would have found it difficult to unearth the 
divisional walls which give him so much distress. 

And the idea that the poor heathen are nonplussed 
at the thought of religious denominationalism is fool- 


AIMS AND PURPOSES rig 


ish. All the great non-Christian religions are full of 
what we call denominations. Mohammedanism is 
usually singled out as a rebuke to Christianity in this 
regard. But Mohammedans would not be grateful for 
this conspicuousness. They say, “The Magians are 
divided into seventy sects, the Jews into seventy-one, 
the Christians into seventy-two, and the Moslems into 
seventy-three, as Mohammed has foretold.” Even in 
schism, Islam claims precedence. Moreover, its 
devotees have passed beyond Christendom in this, 
that only one sect is entitled to salvation in their view, 
each sect holding the others damnable. Historically, 
almost innumerable sects have been developed, of which 
the Sunnees and Shiahs, with their subdivisions, and 
the Matazalites, the Safatians, and Kharejites, are only 
the principal ones. The same thing is true of Bud- 
dhism. In Japan, where Christian denominationalism 
so troubled Lord Curzon, there are nine principal 
Buddhist sects, and forty-two sub-sects, with differences 
of opinion and characteristics more grave and serious 
than those which separate the Protestant denomina- 
tions. 

The reproach of denominationalism is a familiar 
taunt of the Hindu visitors to England and America. 
But nothing in Christendom compares with the intoler- 
able caste divisions of Hinduism, and even inside of 
the Brahmin caste there are diverse schools and rival 
temples. The Hindu reformers have made a great deal 
of the divisions of Christendom, and have preached a 
great catholic religious unity. “Spare me and my 
countrymen the infliction of antiquated and lifeless 
dogmas,” said Keshub Chunder Sen. “I cannot but 
feel perplexed, and even amused, amidst countless and 
quarrelling sects.” How familiar these words sound! 


72 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


They have become part of the stock-in-trade of Oriental 
visitors, with which they tickle the ears of that large 
class of critics of missions at home who could not define 
a dogma if they tried, and who do not venture into 
_ sufficiently close contact with sects to be hurt by them, 
founded split asunder in the most bitter controversy, 
or helped. The sect which Keshub Chunder Sen 
during his life. JI do not think this amused him. 
After his death, the branch of the Brahma Samaj which 
followed him fell into what its leading member, Mr. 
Mozoomdar, called a “condition of anarchy.” Hindu 
reform has outclassed the most centrifugal Christian 
denominationalism. The same history has been re- 
peated in Babism. Professing to be a religious unity, 
shaming Christendom, it broke up into foolish personal 
factions. Nothing could be much further from the 
truth than the assertion that the non-Christian world is 
confused and mystified by the denominationalism of 
Christianity because it has always known unity in its 
religions. It has not, and its own freedom and varia- 
tion of view and diverse theological schools have en- 
abled it to understand very well the principle of re- 
ligious unity in variety. 

To the critics accordingly we reply, “Be careful; your 
words sound plausible, but they do not accord with the 
facts. The difficulty in the way of the acceptance of 
Christianity by men abroad, or by men at home, is not 
denominationalism. ‘That is a pretext, and it is a poor 
and unworthy one.” 

To ourselves we may well say, however, “Why are 
we not one? Do we need so many divisions? Can 
we not draw closer together? Can we not remove 
what real grounds do exist for criticism? Why can we 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 73 


not realise now that unity of all believers for which 
our Lord prayed?” 

The ideal of an independent native Church as a 
formative element in missionary policy involves the 
question of the relation of foreign missions and foreign 
missionaries to this new Church. The question is an 
inevitable one whatever may be the practice of any 
particular denomination. Some denominations, as we 
shall see, work on the principle of a world-wide exten- 
sion of that denomination with many national branches. 
Others follow the principle of establishing totally in- 
dependent national Churches. In either case the same 
problem arises. The problem is inherent in the foreign 
mission enterprise and for that matter in the home 
missionary enterprise, wherever an organised Church 
seeks to establish another organised Church, or even 
where, inside any one Church, an organisation of that 
Church, such as a missionary board, carries on work 
within the field of another organisation of that Church. 
Christianity was meant to spread unceasingly, spon- 
taneously, and vitally. The attempt to atone for the 
failure to evangelise the world through such organic 
evangelisation by the establishment of missionary 
societies and missionary boards, necessary as this at- 
tempt is, brings with it the problem of how to relate 
such agencies, and the Church acting through them, to 
other forms of the Church’s action and organisation. 
There are those who believe that this problem as a 
problem of constitutional statement or form of govern- 
ment is insoluble. It seems probable that the relation 
of home boards to home mission conferences, Presby- 
teries or parishes, and of foreign missions to native 
Churches, of missionary societies to bishops, of the 


74 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


whole temporary device of missionary agencies to the 
permanent institutions of the Church, can never be 
covered and settled by formulas or resolutions, but 
must remain as a discipline for the spirit of Christian 
men and an opportunity for the exercise of their 
qualities of good sense and patience and love. And the 
problem is not only inevitable, but is also desirable. 
If the energies of life should die down and the Western 
Churches discontinue their missionary work on one 
hand, or the native Churches should accept the doom 
of a perpetual dependence and subservience on the 
other hand, the problem would no doubt be escaped, but 
at the price of the failure both of foreign missions and 
of the native Church. Who would welcome such a 
deliverance? Foreign missions were established for 
the very purpose of creating a Church which would 
raise such questions as are now raised. If the dis- 
cussion brings with it painful experiences and foolish 
words on one side or the other or on both sides, these 
spring not from the necessities of the problem but from 
our own human infirmities of mind and spirit, and are 
a challenge to us to prove that the Gospel which we 
preach as sufficient for all needs of the world is suf- 
ficient for our own needs as Christian men engaged in 
the business of building up the Christian Church. 

In all the fields where the work is in an advanced 
stage and in some where it is not, one of the most 
urgent of all mission questions is this question of right 
relations between the native Churches and the missions 
which have come from the Western Churches. So 
grave is the situation in some lands, due to the develop- 
ment of the nationalistic spirit and the sense of duty on 
the part of the Church, and yet the preponderant re- 
sources and power of the foreign missions, that there 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 75 


are some earnest souls who wonder whether heroic, 
even violent measures may not be necessary. In India, 
for example, in sympathy with the extreme nationalistic 
spirit, shall the Indian Church break completely free 
from all foreign relationships, relate itself to Indian 
tradition and temper rather than to the stream of 
historic Christianity, and thus settle the question in the 
radical way that an occasional missionary has sug- 
gested? “The Memorandum on the Further Develop- 
ment and Expansion of Christianity in India,” issued 
by the Christo Samaj, sets forth this possibility : 


“The new nationalism has not left untouched 
Christian life and thought. It has affected the com- 
munity both from the inside and outside. Within the 
community it has made us realise, as never before, that 
Christianity has a part to play in national life, and that 
there is a spiritual heritage of the past to which we 
have been denied access. It has been slowly dawning 
on us that it is only to the extent to which Christian 
life reacts to the Indian past and present that Chris- 
tianity can become a living factor. But the unprepared- 
ness of Indian Christians for fulfilling their destiny is 
now becoming more apparent with the recognition that 
we have been hitherto in a world apart from India, 
created for us by the genius of foreign missions. As 
to the external influence of Christianity in politics, 
though there have been conspicuous cases of Indian 
Christians in public life, the community as a whole has 
not responded, rightly or wrongly, in any effective man- 
ner to political movements. This is now gradually 
passing away, and Indian Christians are showing greater 
interest in all that concerns the political future of 
Indias to" | 

“The ideal line of action that suggests itself to us is 
complete independence and even exclusiveness, and to 
work out the salvation of Indian Christianity without 
any reference to foreign missions. This is necessary 
to recover our normal character as Indian Christians, 


76 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


and will have to be jealously adhered to, until there 
comes into being an Indian Christianity with a distinc- 
tive character of its own. It was stated by an Indian 
belonging to our school of thought that we do not want 
any more foreign missionaries, and that the better type 
of missionary is even a worse enemy of Indian Chris- 
tianity than the ordinary run of missionaries. While 
it may be suicidal for Indians to dissociate themselves 
from and completely disown Western Christianity, we 
perceive that our training under the present system has 
so greatly westernised our ideas and outlook that we 
cannot recover or discover the Indian standpoint with- 
out a negative policy of dissociation from the West as 
well as a positive policy of devotion to the East. In so 
far as the Indian is imbued with the Western mentality, 
he is himself an enemy to Indian Christianity. While 
therefore the Indian has to fight against his own West- 
ern mentality in his attempt to recover his Indian out- 
look, he would immensely complicate the situation by 
association with Western Christians, who could hardly 
be expected to fulfil the requirements that even most 
Indian Christians lack. And the more avowedly 
sympathetic to the Indian standpoint the Westerner is, 
the more subtle and insidious will be the way in which 
he will consciously or unconsciously transmit his West- 
ern mentality and retard the progress of the Indian in 
the path that he alone can discover. We therefore look 
for real salvation from only such adventurous spirits as 
would turn a deaf ear for the present to the temptations 
of association with foreigners and dependence on 
foreign help. They will pre-eminently be the heralds of 
the new era and the creators of the new Christian 
edifice, wherein the religious aspirants of India will 
find their natural abode. For the sake of Indian Chris- 
tianity some Indian Christians will have to take this 
self-denying ordinance and will have to be severely left 
alone to accomplish the task to which they have been 
called. It will be the great privilege of sympathetic 
Indians to stand by these pioneers and prophets and 
directly help them. It will be the duty of all interested 
in the progress of Christ’s Kingdom in India to pray 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 77 


for the advent of such men and hold them up before 
God when they arise.” 


One cannot but have a great deal of sympathy with 
this view. He almost wishes that some such leaders 
would arise, and yet on sober second thought he real- 
ises, as the writers of this Memorandum have done, 
that probably the problems are to be worked out not by 
revolt and alienation but by co-operation and unity. 

And in China where the problem of right relations 
between the nation and Western nations has been 
during the past year more acute than in any other 
country, the leaders both of the Church and of the 
Missions are earnestly seeking to show that in the 
Christian Church East and West can work together 
and can solve all questions under a principle of co- 
operation and unity. 

The aim of Foreign Missions to make Christ known 
and to found His Church makes legitimate and neces- 
sary all activities which prove to be essential to realising 
this aim. No form of work, next to the direct oral 
explanation of the Gospel, seems to us to be more im- 
portant or influential than education. Carey began 
instinctively with schools and Duff soon made out of 
educational missions a distinct and powerful missionary 
method. Since then, however, there have been decades 
of debate over the subject of missionary education, 
with opinions ranging all the way from those who 
advocate education even without religious instruction 
or direct evangelistic aim, to those who deny the legiti- 
macy of any form of educational effort at all and hold 
that missionary work should be restricted absolutely to 
the simple oral preaching of the Gospel. After having 
been quiescent for some years this discussion has now 


78 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


become very much alive once more. All believe in the 
use of education as a missionary agency, but some are 
satisfied with its general influence as a source of light 
and a school of character, as an instrument for the 
diffusion of truth of all kinds and not distinctly as an 
agency for teaching Christianity while others believe 
that its use is subject to very clear and definite aims. 
We believe that foremost among these is the aim to 
win students to the acceptance and confession of Christ 
as their Lord and Saviour and to the dedication of 
their lives to the work of bringing in His Kingdom. 
It does not trouble those who hold this view to have 
this aim denounced as proselytism. If by proselytising 
is meant the effort to persuade Hindus, Mohammedans, 
Buddhists and Confucianists and all men to accept 
Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour and openly to 
confess and follow and serve Him, then the work of 
proselytising is exactly the work in which missions 
are engaged, and to forward that work is the main 
reason for our establishing and maintaining Christian 
schools of whatsoever grade. 

This purpose and character of missionary education 
are Clearly set forth in a deliverance of the Educational 
Board of the Bombay Representative Council of Mis- 
sions in 1921, signed by the Chairman of the Board, 
the Bishop of Bombay, and by its Secretary, the Rev. 
John McLean: 


“Missionaries believe that, though the branches of 
study commonly called secular are necessary to the 
emancipation of the people and to the amelioration of 
their lot, yet education is incomplete which is not 
addressed to the whole man, and must fail of its pur- 
pose unless it touches the heart and purifies the con- 
science. Missionaries are thus firm believers in 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 79 


religious education; that is to say, education conducted 
by religious persons for the purpose of implanting re- 
ligious principles in the souls of the pupils, as the one 
ruling principle of all life and of all knowledge. This 
being the general ideal, neither our own convictions, nor 
our estimate of the significance of Christianity for the 
world, permits us to give any religious education but 
one founded on the Christian religion. 

“Thus, if missionaries engage in education at all, it is 
to offer to all who will receive it full Christian religious 
education. For such education.there has been, and, we 
believe, will continue to be, a demand in this country. 
On the one hand, it is essential to the growing com- 
munity of Indian Christians that they should have such 
an education available for their children. On the other 
hand, many non-Christians have in the past been, and 
many in the present are, desirous that their children 
also should receive such an education.” 


And this is a typical letter from a Mohammedan 
father in India written to Principal Janvier of the 
Ewing Christian College in Allahabad: 


“My son has this year passed his examination from 
the Jumna Mission High School, and I want to give 
him a college education. I prefer Ewing College to 
other colleges because you people impart spiritual 
education as well as worldly education. Both teachings 
should go side by side, and I am very glad that my 
son will be taught Bible also in reading in your college.” 


There are many who would wish to conceive of 
missionary education in somewhat different terms from 
those which I have used. There need be no contro- 
versy over such matters. Truth is truth. And all 
truth is God’s truth. All forces which propagate truth 
are welcomed in the enterprise of making Christ known 
and of founding His Church. 

Modern missions and especially foreign missions to- 


So THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


day have a unique agency ready to their hand in the 
press, with an ever-growing body of readers. Missions 
were the first to introduce modern printing in many 
mission fields and the first to establish schools for the 
people. Now they have their reward in an unstinted 
opportunity for evangelism and education through the 
printed page. What has taken place in Japan is coming 
in lesser and modified measure in other lands. The 
processes of national education to which Japan whole- 
heartedly committed herself a generation and more 
ago have wrought upon the nation with penetrating and 
far-extended influence. They have made a nation of 
readers. At the ricksha stands the coolies read to- 
gether while they wait. Messenger boys have their 
books in their pockets to read as they push their carts 
along the roads. It is claimed that more books are 
published and sold in Japan now each year than in 
Germany. For half-a-mile in one street in Tokyo, 
bookstalls, with new and second-hand books, line the 
street on either side. The press, exceeding in irre- 
sponsibility, in lack of historical perspective, in sobriety, 
in any consciousness of the perils of its power even 
our yellow press at home, if that be possible, finds in 
all this mass of common men who are now able to 
read, a field where fire can run as over a prairie. In 
the schools all classes meet together, and in the de- 
mocracy of their fellowship, and of the truth which 
they are taught, forces are at work which must slowly 
develop a new Japan and which will need the wisest 
guidance, if wise guides can be found to succeed the 
few survivors of the old men who have led Japan so 
successfully along her amazing way. For these great 
forces Christian guides must be supplied. 

Wherever Christians go or wherever they may be, 


AIMS AND PURPOSES SI 


there they must bear themselves as Christians, showing 
in all things the mind and spirit of Christ. All the 
works of love and mercy which it is Christian to do 
they will do, and in doing them they will be making 
Christ known. Loving words and loving deeds must 
ever go together in proclaiming Christ; but if they are 
to be divided, a loving, wordless deed will go further 
to speak of Christ than a loveless or even a loving 
deedless word. Ex-president Eliot of Harvard) 
described after his visit to China in 1912 the wealth, 
of this accessory service of missionaries, resulting from 
the simple fact of their Christian life and example. 


“In Tientsin I saw more of the work of the 
Protestant missions in China than in any other city. No 
fair-minded observer can look at their work as now 
conducted without feeling the highest respect for the 
men and women who do it on the spot, and for the 
Christian goodwill in the Occident which supports it. 
The Protestant missions keep before the Chinese people 
good examples of the Christian family life; they show 
to all the Chinese people who come within their in- 
fluence, young and old, rich and poor, fine types of 
Christian manhood and womanhood; and they per- 
fectly illustrate in practical ways the Christian doctrine 
of. universal brotherhood, of a love which transcends 
the family and embraces humanity. As a rule, the 
missionaries, both men and women, learn to speak some 
Chinese dialect, and become intimately acquainted with 
Chinese manners and customs, and with the workings 
of the Chinese mind. Other foreigners resident in 
China are often profoundly ignorant of everything 
Chinese. The missionaries are generally well informed. 
They teach Chinese children good Occidental literature, 
both religious and secular. They teach exact weighing 
and measuring, and accuracy in the use of numbers, 
subjects in which the Chinese are curiously deficient. 
They teach the inductive method through some ele- 


82 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


mentary science, and the household arts; and they teach 
out-of-door sports and the elements of personal hygiene. 
Since the European and American mission boards have 
provided some of their: missions with medical mis- 
sionaries, the missions thus strengthened have been 
enabled to answer in the most effective way the ques- 
tion of a certain lawyer to Jesus, ‘Who is my neigh- 
bour?? They have not passed by on the other side, like 
the priest and the Levite, but have showed mercy to 
the injured and the diseased. They have done exactly 
what Jesus told the lawyer to do—‘Go and do thou 
likewise’; and this doing has accomplished quite as 
much for the propagation of Christianity as the preach- 
ing and the teaching by missionaries. It is apparently 
impossible to make Orientals take an interest in the 
dogmas which have had such great importance in the 
history of Christianity in Europe; but they are quite 
capable of inferring the value of Christianity from the 
practical beneficence of Christians in the family and in 
society. It is the missionaries who have kept before 
the Chinese the good works of Christianity. Without 
them, the Chinese would have been left to infer the 
moral value of Christianity from the outrageous con- 
duct of the Christian governments toward China during 
the past hundred and fifty years, from the brutalities 
of Christian soldiers and sailors in time of war, from 
the alcoholism of the white races as it is seen in Chinese 
ports, and from the commercialised vices which the 
white races practice in China. Against all these in- 
fluences adverse to Christianity on the Chinese mind 
the missionaries have had to contend; and it is a miracle 
that they have won so large a measure of success.” 
(Eliot, “Some Roads to Peace,” p. 30 f.) 


The Hon. Henry Morgenthau, who was American 
Ambassador in Constantinople during the World War, 
has borne similar testimony: 


“A residence of over two years in Turkey has given 
me the best possible opportunity to see the work of the 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 83 


American missionaries and to know the workers in- 
timately. 

“Without hesitation I declare my high opinion of 
their keen insight into the real needs of the people of 
Turkey. The missionaries have the right idea. They 
go straight to the foundations and provide those in- 
tellectual, physical, moral and religious benefits upon 
which alone any true civilisation can be built. ‘The 
missionaries are the devoted friends of the people of 
Turkey and they are my friends. They are brave, 
intelligent and unselfish men and women. I have come 
to respect all and love many of them. 

“As an American citizen I have been proud of them. 
As an American Ambassador to Turkey I have been 
delighted to help them.” 


This witness to the meaning of the Gospel and of 
life and this application of the law of Christ to human 
relationships is, as we have seen, a legitimate part of 
the aim of missions. It is more than legitimate. It 
is indispensable. Foreign missions, indeed, are not 
charged with the task of Christianising the world. But 
they are responsible for seeking to show in themselves 
and in their relationships and in their influence what 
Christian life for individuals and in human relation- 
ships is meant to be. 

The necessity of this aspect of the missionary task 
was impressively stated by the late Lord Bryce when 
he was the Ambassador of Great Britain to the United 
States in an address to the National Laymen’s Mis- 
sionary Convention in Washington, in November, 1909, 
which should be preserved: 


“What I want to put to vou,” he said, “is the special 
urgency at this moment of your endeavouring to fulfil 
your responsibility to the heathen world. I see at the 
head of the programme of the Washington Convention 
that your watchword is THE EVANGELISATION OF THE 


84. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


WorRLD IN THIS GENERATION. Now, why in this 
generation? J want to give you a reason for the great 
urgency of the question. 

“The moment which we are now living is a critical 
moment, or perhaps, the most critical moment there has 
ever been in the history of the non-Christian races— 
most significant and weighty upon their fate and their 
future. In this time of ours the European races have 
obtained the control of nearly the whole world, and 
influence over those parts of the world in which they 
do not exercise political control. 

“Our material civilisation is permeating every part of 
the world, and telling as it never told before upon 
every one of the non-Christian races. It is trans- 
forming the conditions of life. They in their countries 
are being exploited as never before. Means of trans- 
portation are being introduced as they never were be- 
fore, which enable foreigners to pass freely among 
them, and which are completely breaking up and de- 
stroying the old organisation and civilisation, such as it 
was, that existed among them. 

“Under this shock not only the material conditions 
of their life, but also their traditions and beliefs, their 
old customs, and everything that was associated with 
them, and depended upon their beliefs and their customs 
is rapidly crumbling away and disappearing. Their 
morality, such as it was, was associated with their 
beliefs and traditions. This we are destroying. This 
must perish under the shock and impact of the stronger 
civilisation, which we have brought with us. 

“This is the time for us to give them the one supreme 
gift which the world has ever received, and in which 
we believe the safety and future hope of the world lie, 
a knowledge of the life and the teaching of our Lord 
Jesus Christ. That is what we are called upon to give 
them. We are called upon now to seize this critical 
moment, which is also a favourable moment, to provide 
them with the means and basis and the foundation of 
life instead of that which has crumbled from beneath 
them. 

“What I want to put to you is the supreme im- 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 85 


portance at this moment of our doing what we can to 
fill that void which we have made, to give them some- 
thing to live by instead of that by which they have lived 
heretofore. Now, when the old things are passing away 
from them, is the time for us to give them something 
new and something better by which they may live, 
through which they may come again into a truer prog- 
ress than they ever could do in their ancient ways. 

“Let Christianity go to them not as a destroying 
force, not as being the mere profession of those who 
are grasping their land and trying to turn to account 
their labour; let it go as a beneficent power, which is 
to fill their souls with new thoughts and new hopes, 
which is to be a link between all the races of mankind 
of whatever blood and whatever speech and whatever 
colour, and which is to teach them that they are all the 
children of one Father in heaven.” 


By none of its various methods of action has the 
foreign mission enterprise reached more directly the 
hearts of those for whom it has worked or more clearly 
represented Christ than by its hospitals and medical 
work. A hundred mission hospitals and missionary 
doctors might be called in illustration. Two will 
suffice. One is the great medical work which Dr. 
Dugald Christie built up at Mukden, and young Arthur 
Jackson of the staff who gave his life in the effort to 
stay the pneumonic plague in I9I1, and at whose 
funeral the Chinese viceroy made this remarkable 
address: 


“We have shown ourselves unworthy of the great 
trust laid upon us by our Emperor: we have allowed a 
dire pestilence to overrun the sacred capital. His 
Majesty the King of Great Britain shows sympathy 
with every country when calamity overtakes it; his 
subject, Dr. Jackson, moved by his Sovereign’s spirit, 
and with the heart of the Saviour, who gave His life to 


86 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


deliver the world, responded nobly when we asked him 
to help our country in its need. He went forth to help 
us in our fight daily, where the pest lay thickest ; amidst 
the groans of the dying he struggled to cure the stricken, 
to find medicine to stay the evil. Worn by his efforts, 
the pestilence seized upon him, and took him from us 
long ere his time. Our sorrow is beyond all measure; . 
our grief too deep for words. 

“Dr. Jackson was a young man of high education 
and great natural ability. He came to Manchuria with 
the intention of spreading medical knowledge, and 
thus conferring untold blessings on the Eastern people. 
In pursuit of his ideal he was cut down. The Presby- 
terian Mission has lost a recruit of great promise, the 
Chinese Government a man who gave his life in his 
desire to help them. 

“O Spirit of Dr. Jackson, we pray you intercede 
for the twenty million people of Manchuria, and ask 
the Lord of Heaven to take away this pestilence, so 
that we may once more lay our heads in peace upon our 
pillows. 

“In life you were brave, now you are an exalted 
Spirit. Noble Spirit, who sacrificed your life for us, 
help us still, and look down in kindness upon us all.” 


The other illustration is the work of Dr. Wanless 
of Miraj, India. Beginning nearly thirty years ago 
with one gift of ten thousand dollars, Dr. Wanless, 
with Dr. Vail’s unequalled help in recent years, has 
built up a great plant which could not be reproduced 
now for seven hundred thousand rupees, with a score 
of buildings, with three or four fully equipped operat- 
ing-rooms, between one and two hundred beds crowded 
almost the year round, with thousands of out-patients. 
Indian hotels and lodging houses to care for the people 
who come from all over India have grown up about 
the hospital on property whose value the hospital has 
multiplied ten or twenty fold. It seems likely that the 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 87 


chief fame of the state will lie in this noble work which 
the spirit of Christ has built up. “Sir,” said a Brah- 
man in a railway carriage to Bombay, speaking to a 
friend of ours who was a stranger to him, “TI have just 
come from Miraj. That is a wonderful place. I have 
watched those doctors. It is beyond understanding 
that such men who might amass wealth anywhere do 
that work for nothing but love and their own bare 
support.” Fifty men are studying medicine in a medi- 
cal school connected with the hospital, all but four of 
them Christians. On the last evening of my visit to 
Miraj, they invited us to meet them in their dormitory 
quadrangle. The full moon came up over us as we 
sat together in the court in the quadrangle and listened 
to their address. ‘‘Here,” said their spokesman, “you 
can see India in miniature. We come from all parts 
of the land. We speak nine languages. We belong to 
different races. If you ask what brings us all here, I 
will tell you. First it was Christ. Second, it was the 
fame of Dr. Wanless.” What a fountain of power 
such a place is! Thousands of people have gone out 
from it to all parts of India grateful for physical heal- 
ing. Hundreds of young men have been sent through- 
out the country as Christian doctors. In more than 
one village we met them, standing out as the foremost 
men of the community. In two places we found them 
filling the positions of chief municipal honour and 
responsibility, presiding over high caste men though 
they themselves had come from the lowest of the out- 
caste people. It is both the high and the low that this 
medical work is touching. Out of gratitude and ap- 
preciation the Maharajah of Kolhapur has applied and 
keeps in order the fine car which Dr. Vail uses in his 
work, and Dr. Wanless has two decorations from the 


88 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Government of India. These are but little things, 
however, in comparison with the looks of gratitude and 
almost worship which one sees following the doctor 
as he goes with them through their great clinic of love. 

Modern foreign missions have thus far had two 
great characteristics which in the judgment of some 
make the further continuance of the enterprise im- 
possible. 

In the first place they have represented a simple and 
in the main harmonious theological view, especially of 
the Person of Christ. But there are those who con- 
ceive that the modern missionary need not be concerned 
to present the old view of Christ. ‘Our missionary 
bids his hearers formulate their thoughts of Christ in 
their own way, provided they retain the authority of his 
leadership. 

“Does He save you from your sin? Call Him 
Saviour! 

“Does He free you from the slavery of your pas- 
sions? Call Him Redeemer! 

“Does He teach you as no one else has taught you? 
Call Him Teacher! 

“Does He mould and master your life? Call Him 
Master! 

“Does He shine upon the pathway that is dark to 
you? Call Him Guide! 

“Does He reveal God to you? Call Him the Son 
of God! 

“Does He reveal man? Call Him the Son of Man! 

“Or in following Him, are your lips silent in your 
incapacity to define Him and His influence upon you? 
Call Him by no name, but follow Him!’ (Bliss, 
“The Modern Missionary,” p. 22.) 

On the other hand there are those of us who do not 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 89 


see how Christ can be made known or His Church 
founded or men taught to preach the Gospel without a 
clear and definite conviction about Him and without 
the maintenance of the historic faith of the Church 
with regard to Him. Only time can reveal the issue. 
Meanwhile the missionary enterprise is still going on 
and the great body of evangelical men and women who 
are its supporters and its representatives have been able 
to work together in the spirit of such a deliverance as 
that of the International Missionary Council at its 
meeting in Oxford in 1923: 


“The International Missionary Council has given 
attention to the anxiety which is felt in many quarters 
about the possibility of missionary co-operation in 
face of doctrinal differences, and thinks it opportune to 
review the co-operation which has actually been under- 
taken under its auspices or those of the national and 
other councils which it correlates and other similar co- 
operative action, and to set out afresh the principles 
which have emerged from these experiences. 

“The International Council has never sought nor is 
it its function to work out a body of doctrinal opinions 
of its own. The only doctrinal opinions in the Council 
are those which the various members bring with them 
into it from the Churches and Missionary Boards to 
which they belong. It is no part of the duty of the 
Council to discuss the merits of those opinions, still less 
to determine doctrinal questions. 

“But it has never been found in practice that in 
consequence of this the Council is left with nothing 
but an uncertain mass of conflicting opinions. The 
Council is conscious of a great measure of agreement 
which centres in a common obligation and a common 
loyalty. We are conscious of a common obligation to 
proclaim the Gospel of Christ in all the world, and this 
sense of obligation is made rich and deep because of our 
knowledge of the havoc wrought by sin and of the 


go THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


efficacy of the salvation offered by Christ. We are 
bound together further by a common loyalty to Jesus 
Himself, and this loyalty is deep and fruitful because 
we rejoice to share the confessions of St. Peter, “Thou 
art the Christ, the Son of the Living God,’ and of St. 
Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’ The secret of our 
co-operation is the presence with us of Jesus Christ, 
Human Friend and Divine Helper. From this com- 
mon obligation and this common loyalty flow many 
other points of agreement, and our differences in doc- 
trine, great though in some instances they are, have not 
hindered us from profitable co-operation in counsel. 
When we have gathered together, we have experienced 
a growing unity among ourselves, in which we recog- 
nise the influence of the Holy Spirit. At these meet- 
ings we have come to a common mind on many mat- 
ters and been able to frame recommendations and state- 
ments. These have never had the character of com- 
mand or direction, and it has always rested with the 
Churches or Missions to give them, if they would, 
authority by adopting them or carrying them into 
action. 

“Co-operation in work is more likely to be embar- 
rassed by doctrinal differences than co-operation in 
counsel. Yet there is a wide range of matters such as 
negotiations with governments, the securing of re- 
ligious liberty, the combating of the evils arising from 
the sale of narcotic drugs, collection and survey of 
facts, investigation by educational method, etc., which 
are not affected by doctrinal differences. A still more 
imposing list might be drawn up of types of work in 
which impediments from doctrinal differences might 
have been anticipated, but experience in many lands 
has shown that most valuable co-operation is possible 
between many Churches and Missions. Such are the 
translation of the Holy Scriptures, the production and 
dissemination of Christian Literature, the conduct of 
schools and colleges and medical institutions, and pro- 
visions for the training of missionaries. Every piece of 
co-operation in work which this Council or, as we be- 


AIMS AND PURPOSES QI 


lieve, any council connected with it encourages or 
guides is confined to those Churches or Missions which 
freely and willingly take part in it. It would be en- 
tirely out of harmony with the spirit of this movement 
to press for such co-operation in work as would be 
felt to compromise doctrinal principles or to strain 
consciences.” 


In the second place missions have of necessity been 
the offer to the people of the non-Christian nations of 
a religion from without. It is argued by some that 
the new nationalistic spirit will not welcome these extra- 
national influences, and that especially countries like 
China which have been under the limitations involved 
in treaties which abridged tariff autonomy and gave 
foreigners rights of extra-territoriality, will be preju- 
diced against missionaries coming from the nations 
which are unwilling to modify these treaties. Many 
difficult problems are indeed involved in this situation, 
some of which we shall need to consider. The question 
of how far missions can or cannot dissociate them- 
selves from the political and economic activities of the 
nation from which the missionaries come is a very 
complicated question. Some might think that the 
proper and easy solution would be to regard foreign 
missions as a supra-national movement altogether, with 
no political affiliations whatsoever. There is truth in 
this view of missions, but it is not a working possibility. 
Passports, mandates, treaty provisions, naturalisation 
and property laws all require a citizenship status of all 
missionaries. And for good or ill missions must ac- 
cept the conditions which exist. Sometimes these 
appear to be good. In 1917 the Urumia Mission 
Station in Persia, through one of its members, the Rev. 


92 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Hugo A. Muller, presented to the American Presby- 
terian Board of Foreign Missions a faded and torn 
American flag, with the following letter: 


“Gentlemen : 

American missionaries in the foreign field love the 
American flag; no less has the American flag cause for 
gratitude to American missionaries in distant fields. 
The American flag is honoured in the Orient—an 
honour due in no small degree to the missionary’s in- 
fluence; and, on the other hand, many American mis- 
sionaries owe to the American flag their lives and the 
lives of many natives who have clung to them in times 
of trouble. 

I have the honour, on behalf of the members of 
Urumia Station, to present to you a well-worn flag 
which was graciously used of God in defending the 
rights of the weak and defenceless in Urumia, Persia, 
during a time of great turmoil. 

This flag was hoisted over the gateway leading to the 
main compound of your Mission Station in the city of 
Urumia (West Persia Mission) soon after the evacua- 
tion of the city by the Russian army on January 2, 
1915, and before the entrance into the city of the 
Kurdish vanguards of the Turkish army on January 4, 
1915. It thereafter flew uninterruptedly until after 
the Russian army had re-entered the city, May 24, 1915, 
and again taken up the reins of government—a period 
of about five months. 

During those months it was an instrument under 
God’s grace in saving the lives of 15,000 defenceless 
Christians who had taken refuge under its shadow, and 
indirectly it was a strong influence for quiet and order 
in a much wider circle. 

Could this flag speak, it would tell you heart-rending 
tales of sorrow and suffering, of injustice and extor- 
tion, of cruelty and death; it would preach powerful 
sermons on faith, love, sympathy; it would make you 
feel the gratitude which it read in the 15,000 pairs of 
eyes that were daily upturned during these sad months 


AIMS AND PURPOSES 93 


—a gratitude which is alive to-day, toward God and 
toward Christian America, and which will live on 
through generations. 
Fraternally yours in the great Cause, 
Huco A. Mutter.” 


But oftentimes the political affiliations of missions 
work out harmful effects, as we shall see. Foreign 
missions can only do their utmost to make the truth 
clear, to assert the sympathy of the Christian Church 
with what is right and just, and its disapproval of what 
is unjust and wrong. 

In any case the business of foreign missions is to 
found the Church of the nation. The task of estab- 
lishing the law of Christ in the nation is the task of 
the Church of that nation and not of foreign missions 
to that nation. The fundamental task of foreign mis- 
sions is accurately stated in the words which were 
quoted at the beginning of this chapter and which may 
be quoted now again at its end: 


“The supreme and controlling aim of foreign missions 
is to make the Lord Jesus Christ known to all men as 
their Divine Saviour and to persuade them to become 
His disciples; to gather these disciples: into Christian 
Churches which shall be self-propagating, self-support- 
ing and self-governing ; to co-operate, so long as neces- 
sary, with these Churches in the evangelising of their 
countrymen, and in bringing to bear on all human life 
the spirit and principles of Christ.” 


CHAPTER SIL 


Tue SocrtaAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS OF MODERN 
MIssIONSs 


Ir has come to be accepted as assured fact that the 
founders of the modern foreign missionary enterprise 
were destitute of the social ideal. Their motives and 
aims, it is supposed, were purely individualistic and 
other worldly. They were seeking to save souls one 
by one from a future doom and had no conception of 
the mission of Christianity: to bind men together in a 
purified human society. Therefore their one method 
was to present the Gospel orally, to the neglect of those 
forms of social service and those conceptions of human 
unity which to our modern view are an essential part of 
the Gospel and an indispensable agency of its propaga- 
tion, because without them words alone can neither 
express nor convey it. Almost all of our recent mis- 
sionary literature accepts without question this view of 
the motive and method of the early missionaries. 

In affirming the presence in the early missionaries 
of an intensely rigorous and solemn spirit, modern 
missionary writers are wholly right. These mission- 
aries did believe that eternal issues hang upon the rela- 
tion of mento Christ. They accepted without wavering 
the New Testament view of the significance for the 
world to come of human faith and character in this 
world. They believed that all men needed to be saved, 
and that there was none other Name given under 
heaven among men by which they might be saved 
except the name of Christ. They did seek to reach men 

04 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 95 


one by one and to secure the conversion of individuals. 
They did believe that the things which are seen are 
temporal and that the things which are unseen are 
eternal, and they did conceive separately of Chris- 
tianity and of the physical and social fruitage which it 
might bear. The earnestness of their convictions in 
these respects cannot be overstated. Without it they 
would never have faced the inertia and resistance of 
the Church and of society and succeeded in launching 
their undertaking. It would be easy to put together a 
mass of testimony illustrative of the strength of their 
grasp of the individualistic elements in Christianity 
and of their sense of its eternal significance. And 
much could be produced that would seem extreme or 
even grotesque to our contemporary mind whose grasp 
on these realities is not so firm, or whose conception of 
their relation to other elements in Christianity and of 
the scope of the Kingdom of God is more complete and 
just. 

What will be pointed out in this chapter is that while 
the positive conception of the ideal of the missionary 
founders which has just been referred to is quite true, 
the view that they were devoid of the social concep- 
tion of missions and negligent of the social expression 
of Christianity in service for the community and of 
the ideal of human progress is a great mistake. The 
fact is that both unconsciously, because the social prin- 
ciple is implicit in the true missionary spirit, and con- 
sciously, because the missionaries were Christian men 
and were interested in all that affected humanity, the 
founders of modern missions conceived their work not 
only in terms of individual conversion but also in 
terms of human service and brotherhood. Indeed one 
wonders whether there were not some of them who 


96 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


over socialised the missionary ideal and thought too 
much in terms of civilisation and general benevolence, 
and inadequately of the regeneration of personal char- 
acter and of the establishment of the Christian Church 
as a definite institution. 

The evidence in support of these statements is too 
abundant to be condensed into the space of a chapter, 
but it will suffice to cite (1) the men who led the long 
list of missionaries who have gone out from England 
and Scotland, Carey and Duff, and the man who con- 
tributed more than any other individual at home to 
settle and define the aims and methods of foreign mis- 
sions, Henry Venn, (2) the men who filled correspond- 
ing places in American foreign missions, Brainerd, 
Mills, Judson, Evarts and Lowrie, (3) the policies of 
the Moravians and of the founders of the Continental 
missions, like Hebich. 

Carey is acknowledged as the founder of our modern 
missionary day, although he had forerunners from 
Germany, like Zeigenbalg and Schwartz and Kier- 
nander. He held firmly, beyond a doubt, the funda- 
mental ideas of a sharply individual Christian experi- 
ence and of the need of the individual salvation from 
sin here and from eternal death of the people to whom 
he went. He wrote to his son William, in 1807, when 
William had gone as a missionary to Binapoor, “Should 
you after many years’ labour be instrumental in the 
conversion of only one soul, it would be worth the work 
of a whole life.” On his own tombstone he prescribed 
that only his name and the date of birth and death 
should be inscribed, and the lines: 


“A wretched, poor and helpless worm, 
On thy kind arms I fall.” 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS Q7 


Whatever is said of the rigorist and personal charac- 
ter of the religious experience and theological view of 
the early missionaries is true of Carey. And at the 
same time it is true that in social and community 
service, in consciously influencing the economic and 
intellectual life of the nation to which he had gone, 
and in purposely affecting the forces of progress and 
civilisation, Carey was one of the most powerful per- 
sonalities of whom history has any record. He began 
life as a shoemaker and a school teacher with a deep 
concern over human wretchedness and the slave trade. 
His “Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use 
Means for the Conversion of the Heathen,” which was 
the germinal treatise for foreign missions, is full of 
what we call to-day the Social Conscience. The 
ignorance and cruelty of men and the barbarity and 
uncivilisation of the world were alleged by others as 
reasons for not undertaking Christian Missions. Carey 
reversed the thought: 


“After all, the uncivilised state of the heathen, in- 
stead of affording an objection against preaching the 
Gospel to them, ought to furnish an argument for it. 
Can we as men, or as Christians, hear unmoved that a 
great part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls are as 
immortal as ours, and who are as capable as ourselves 
of adorning the Gospel and contributing by their 
preachings, writings or practices to the glory of our 
Redeemer’s name and the good of His Church, are 
enveloped in ignorance and barbarism? Can we hear 
that they are without the Gospel, without government, 
without laws, and without arts and sciences, and not 
exert ourselves to introduce among them the senti- 
ments of men and of Christians? Would not the 
spread of the Gospel be the most effectual means of 
their civilisation? Would not that make them useful 
members of society?” 


98 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


The missionary methods which he advocates include 
agriculture, the introduction of good cattle, and pro- 
motion of the conscious interests of the people. The 
project which he set about accomplishing at once upon 
his arrival in India was a mission which would main- 
tain itself upon and for the industrial life of the com- 
munity. He engaged in the manufacture of indigo. 
He made the best type and the best paper in India. He 
devised new methods of paper-manufacture. He in- 
troduced the first steam engine erected in India. He 
began the first Indian newspaper. He studied the 
natural history of the country and began great collec- 
tions and laid out experimental gardens. “Spare no 
pains to get me seeds and roots,” he wrote to William, 
and names animal specimens he desires. His letters are 
full of these matters. On August 5, 1794, he wrote to 
the Society at home, “I wish you also to send me a few 
instruments of husbandry, viz., scythes, sickles, plough- 
wheels, and such things; and a yearly assortment of all 
garden and flowering seeds, and seeds of fruit trees, 
that you can possibly procure; and let them be packed 
in papers, or bottles well stopped, which is the best 
method. All these things, at whatever price you can 
procure them, and the seeds of all sorts of field and 
forest trees, etc., I will regularly remit you the money 
for every year; and I hope that I may depend upon 
the exertions of my numerous friends to procure 
them. Apply to London seedsmen and others, as it 
will be a lasting advantage to this country; and I shall 
have it in my power to do this for what I now call 
my own country. Only take care that they are new 
and dry.”” He founded in 1820 “The Agricultural and 
Horticultural Society in India” and prepared its in- 
quiries which, as Dr. George Smith said, “show a grasp 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 99 


of principles, a mastery of detail, and a kindliness of 
spirit which reveal the practical farmer, the accom- 
plished observer, and the thoughtful philanthropist all 
in one. One only we may quote: ‘19. In what manner 
do you think the comforts of the peasantry around you 
could be increased, their health better secured, and their 
general happiness promoted?” This Society became a 
great influence for good in India, and later grew into 
three and formed the model for the Royal Agricultural 
Society of England, founded in 1838. He justified his 
action in these matters, “by quoting his hero, Brainerd, 
who was constrained to assist his Indian converts with 
his counsels in sowing their maize and arranging their 
secular concerns. ‘Few,’ he adds with the true breadth 
of genius which converted the Baptist shoemaker into 
the Christian statesman and scholar, ‘who are exten- 
sively acquainted with human life, will esteem these 
cares either unworthy of religion or incongruous with 
its highest enjoyments.’”’ He protested against the 
narrowness of supporters of the work in America who 
had given money for theological teaching which was 
not to be used for teaching science. “I never heard 
anything more illiberal. Pray, can youth be trained up 
for the Christian ministry without science? Do you in 
America train up youths for it without any knowledge 
of science?” He began the great movements for the 
care of the leper, for the abolition of widow burning 
and infanticide, and for the abatement of other moral 
evils which “he opposed all his life with a practical 
reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had 
done so much to create triumph. He knew the people 
of India, their religious, social, and economic condition, . 
as no Englishman before him had done. He stood 


I0O THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


between them and their foreign Government at the 
beginning of our intimate contact with all classes as 
detailed administrators and rulers.” Carey’s biog- 
raphy is one long record of ceaseless fidelity to his 
central, individual, spiritual aim at the same time that 
he served society with more power and vigour, pouring 
out of this one man, than can be found in some whole 
present day governments. 


“An ambassador for Christ above all things like 
Paul,” says Dr. Smith, Carey’s biographer, “but, also 
like him, becoming all things to all men that he might 
win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and 
often at the same time a captain of labour, a school- 
master, a printer, the developer of the vernacular 
speech, the expounder of the classical language, the 
translator of both into English and of the English Bible 
into both, the founder of a pure literature, the purifier 
of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of 
the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the 
would-be-suicide, of the down-trodden and oppressed. 
We have now to see him on the scientific or the physical 
and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his 
strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, 
and with almost equal care avoids the political or ad- 
ministrative as his Master did. But even then it was 
his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would 
use science and politics alike to bring nations to the 
birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of 
these principles to the course of God’s providence and 
the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for 
literature and for humanity, as in what he abstained 
from doing in the practical region of public life, the first 
English missionary was an example to all of every race 
who have followed him in the past century.” 


The first, and in some regards the greatest missionary 
of the Scotch Churches was Alexander Duff. He too 
was a man of the deepest and most living personal 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS IOL 


Christian experience, and a believer in and preacher of 
the Gospel of personal salvation from sin and death and 
hell. But is there a modern missionary or any leader 
of any Church or in any land who is Duff’s superior in 
his discernment of the relation of religion to the whole 
of human life, or in the mastery of his influence over 
the tides of any nation’s intellectual and political life? 


“It was the special glory of Alexander Duff,” said 
Bishop Cotton, when the great missionary was leaving 
India for the last time, “that arriving here in the midst 
of a great intellectual movement of a completely 
atheistical character, he at once resolved to make that 
character Christian. When the new generation of 
Bengalees and too many, alas, of their European friends 
and teachers were talking of Christianity as an obsolete 
superstition, soon to be burned up in the pyre on which 
the creeds of the Brahman, the Buddhist and the 
Mohammedan were already perishing, Alexander Duff 
suddenly burst upon the scene with his unhesitating 
faith, his indomitable energy, his varied erudition, and 
his never-failing stream of fervid eloquence, to teach 
them that the Gospel was not dead or sleeping, not the 
ally of ignorance and error, not ashamed or unable to 
vindicate its claims to universal reverence; but that 
then, as always, the Gospel of Christ was marching for- 
ward in the van of civilisation, and that the Church of 
Christ was still ‘the light of the world.’ The effect 
of his fearless stand against the arrogance of infidelity 
has lasted to this day; and whether the number he 
baptised is small or great (some there are among them 
whom we will know and honour) it is quite certain that 
the work which he did in India can never be undone, 
unless we, whom he leaves behind, are faithless to his 
example.” 


Duff founded a new type of education in India. 
He developed the grant-in-aid scheme in the educational 
system. His influence determined the educational 


I02 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


policy of the Government from his time down to this 

present day. He accomplished, according to Sir 
Charles Trevelyan, the reform of writing the Indian 
language in Roman letters. He furnished an unflinch- 
ing moral conscience in Calcutta which did not hesitate 
for a moment to call even governors-general to ac- 
count. When it was proposed to keep him at home in 
Scotland a storm of protest arose in India. “His 
name,” said one appeal from eleven learned Brahmans, 
in Sanskrit, “is in the mouth of every Hindu because 
of his transcendent eloquence, learning and philan- 
thropy.” He was Vice-Chancellor of the University 
of Calcutta. , 


“To his gigantic mind,” says Dr. Banerjea, “the 
successive vice-chancellors paid due deference, and he 
was the virtual governor of the university. ... Dr. 
Duff was the first person who insisted on education in 
the physical sciences, and strongly urged the estab- 
lishment of a professorship of physical science for the 
university.” 


He was a Christian missionary, but he was also a 
bigger man than the men about him. He was the 
means of introducing real medical education, when the 
Government was afraid to touch it for caste prejudice. 
He secured for the physical sciences their right place. 
He was never afraid of truth. Truth would never 
hurt truth, he held, and he was sure that-the truth about 
God would never suffer from truth about His world. 
Sir Henry Maine, who succeeded him as vice-chan- 
cellor, referred to this quality in a convocation as he 
left India: 


“I am not aware that he ever desired the university 
to refuse instruction in any subject of knowledge be- 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 103 


cause he considered it dangerous. Where men of 
feebler minds or weaker faith would have shrunk from 
encouraging the study of this or that classical language, 
because it enshrined the archives of some antique 
superstition, or would have refused to stimulate pro- 
ficiency in this or that walk of physical science, be- 
cause its conclusions were supposed to lean to irreligious 
consequences, Dr. Duff, believing his own creed to be 
true, believed also that it had the great characteristic 
of truth—that characteristic which nothing else except 
truth possesses—that it can be reconciled with every- 
thing else which is also true. Gentlemen, if you only 
realise how rare this combination of qualities is—how 
seldom the energy which springs from religious con- 
viction is found united with perfect fearlessness in 
encouraging the spread of knowledge, you will under- 
stand what we have lost through Dr. Duff’s departure, 
and why I place it among the foremost events in the 
university year.” 


If any one wishes to read noble and glowing orations 
rich with the broadest conception of the relation of 
Christian missions to the progress of true civilisation, 
let him turn to Duff’s addresses. There as in Duff’s 
own life and work he will find conclusive evidence that 
our social interpretations of to-day are no new dis- 
covery but were obvious to our fathers and before 
them to their fathers. 

And this same combination of the intensest evan- 
gelical individualism with the fullest social ideal which 
characterised these first two great British missionaries 
is found also in the man who at home more than any 
other single man shaped missionary sentiment and 
policy, Henry Venn, for thirty years Secretary of the 
Church Missionary Society. He belonged to the old 
evangelical school. He held the very ideas which to- 
day are set off against the social view and the interpre- 


104. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


tation of Christianity in terms of political and economic 
service. But his life was full of just such service, 
and no one has ever seen and stated more clearly the 
inevitable relations of missions and national life. 
Witness his private journal, January 30, i850: 


“Flastened to Sir E. Buxton’s, to a meeting of Aboli- 
tionists; present, Lord Monteagle, Gurney, Gurney 
Hoare, Captain Denman, Captain Trotter, Captain Bee- 
croft. Two hours’ discussion upon Parliamentary 
tactics for the Session. Agreed that the squadron 
must be maintained; and that, if possible, the present 
protecting duty upon free sugar should be retained 
for a few years longer.” 

November 28th, 1851. “Mr. Fenn called, and dis- 
cussed for some time Ceylon affairs; also Messrs. 
Hinderer, Allen, and Hensman, to whom I expounded 
the principles upon which they were to encourage 
native industry and lawful commerce, without involving 
the Mission in the charge of trading.” 


He seeks to promote the growth of cotton in Sierra 
Leone and sends out cotton presses and machinery. 


November 11th, 1856. “A deputation from the 
Chamber of Commerce in Manchester to London, in 
order to prepare a reply to a communication from Lord 
Clarendon upon African trade... . The Chamber of 
Commerce had referred to our documents, and thought 
them most valuable. . . . I have already agreed to go 
to Manchester on Friday. Mr. Moseley proposed that 
I should state my views to the leading members of the 
Chamber of Commerce on Saturday morning... .” 


Venn’s biography sums up his work for Africa: 
“His missionary principles (the conversion of in- 


dividual souls to Christ the only solid foundation of a 
mission, that a preached Gospel is the power of God, 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 105 


that all other arrangements must give way to a preached 
Gospel, etc., etc.) were fixed and unalterable; but at 
the same time, he never forgot to enlist in the good 
cause all such collateral aids as were not inconsistent 
with these principles, or obstructive of them... . 

“Tt was this feeling that led him to throw himself 
ardently into the development of native industry in 
West Africa. Every native merchant who visited him 
—and there were few who did not—was urged to collect 
and transmit to him specimens of the products of his 
country. He did not rest until he had proved by care- 
ful analysis the superiority of Sierra Leone arrowroot, 
and had seen it take its independent place in the home 
market. He produced well-chosen samples of the wild 
cotton of the Gold Coast, and had them tested at Man- 
chester. He visited that great city and most of the 
large towns of Lancashire; and his accurate calcula- 
tions, business-like expositions, and, later on, his in- 
vestigation and audit of accounts, were the marvel of 
those most active merchants. He arranged for the 
careful training of two or three negroes in Kew 
Gardens, and thereby interested the Director, the late 
sir W. Hooker, so that he was ready to recommend the 
establishment of a botanic garden at Lagos. He also 
provided for the medical education in England of three 
negroes, who have since done well in the employment 
of the Government on the West Coast. He found 
means of reaching the late Prince Consort, who had 
before honoured Dr. Krapp with a personal interview, 
when he first brought to England the tidings of those 
wondrous discoveries in East and Central Africa, of 
which that missionary with his colleague, Rebmann, 
was the pioneer, and the Prince had then entrusted him 
with a present of an Arabic Bible and a clock, to be 
given to the Imam of Muscat, the Suzerain of the Sultan 
of Zanzibar, with a representation of the folly and 
miseries of the East African Slave Trade. His royal 
Highness now welcomed the efforts for the civilisation 
of Western Africa, admitted the Rev. S. Crowther, now 
the Negro Bishop of the Niger, to an audience at which 
her Majesty was also present, and took his share in the 


106 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


philanthropic movement by the presentation of simple 
mills and machines for the use of the native chiefs. All 
this time Mr. Venn was most unremitting in his efforts 
to maintain the African Squadron. Memorials, memo-_ 
randa, deputations to the Foreign Office, the Colonial 
Office, the Admiralty never failed to be presented at 
the right time. 

“Correspondence that of itself would form a volume 
attests the thoroughness with which he entered into the 
scheme of the navigation of the Niger—that scheme 
which is already bearing such wonderful fruit in the 
Niger Mission, though as yet but in its germ. The 
welfare of Africa, his childhood’s love, often brought 
him into contact with Lord Palmerston, himself equally 
in earnest as to the suppression of the slave-trader, 
who always evinced for him the greatest respect and 
regard.” 


And the best statements we have of the relations of 
missions to politics are from Henry Venn’s hand. 

What has been found true of Carey, Duff, and Venn, 
is true of our American missionary founders also. 
David Brainerd was one of the most intensely sub- 
jective Christians of whom we know. His journals 
are mystical and personal to the last degree. No one 
more perfectly represents than he the supposed “old 
motive’ of missions and the old message and method. 
Yet it was to his example that Carey appealed to justi- 
fication of his own social service. When his Indians 
were in danger of losing their hunting-lands through 
debts due to drink he persuaded some friends, as his 
journal states, “to expend the money which they had 
been and still were collecting for the religious interests 
of the Indian, at least a part of it, for discharging their 
debts and securing these lands, that there might be no 
entanglement lying upon them to hinder the settlement 
and hopeful enlargement of a Christian congregation 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 107 


of Indians in these parts.” He notes with joy the 
moral and social effects of the Gospel, the reformation 
of external manners and the renovation of life. He 
aided the Indians in their search for better farming 
lands. “The design,” he writes, “of their settling thus 
in a body, and cultivating their lands, of which they 
have done very little in their pagan state, being of such 
necessity and importance to their religious interest, as 
well as worldly comfort, I thought it proper to call 
them together, and show them the duty of labouring 
with faithfulness and industry, and that they must not 
now ‘be slothful in business,’ as they had ever been in 
their pagan state. I endeavoured to press the impor- 
tance of their being laborious, diligent, and vigorous in 
the prosecution of their business; especially at the 
present juncture, the season of planting being now 
near, in order to their being in a capacity of living to- 
gether, and enjoying the means of grace and instruc- 
tion. Having given them directions for their work, 
which they very much wanted, as well as for their be- 
haviour in divers respects, | explained, sang, and en- 
deavoured to inculcate upon them the cxxviith Psalm, 
common metre, Dr. Watts’ version.” 

On July 21, 1746, he writes in his journal, “Took 
care of my people’s secular business and was not a 
little exercised with it. Had some degree of composure 
and comfort in secret retirement.” All his longing was 
for heaven and meanwhile “to do something for pro- 
moting the interest of religion, and the souls of par- 
ticular persons.”’ To save souls was his one consuming 
thought. Yet he taught his Indians how to clear their 
lands and raise their crops and he bore their economic 
burdens, and sought to teach them the principle of 
unity in a Christian society. 


108 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


After Brainerd, Samuel J. Mills was the great crea- 
tive force in foreign missions in America. It was his 
tireless and irrepressible spirit which founded the Hay- 
stack band at Williams College and the society of new 
missionaries at Andover. As Dr. Griffin, afterwards 
President of Williams College, said: 


“T have been in situations to know that from the 
counsels formed in that sacred conclave (referring to 
Mills and his associates at Williams), or from the 
mind of Mills himself, arose the American Board of 
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American 
Bible Society, the United Foreign Missionary Society, 
the African school, under the care of the Synod of 
New York and New Jersey, besides all the impetus 
given to Domestic Missions, to the Colonisation Society, 
and to the general cause of benevolence in both hemi- 
spheres.” He then adds, “If I had any instrumentality 
in originating any of these measures, I here publicly 
declare that in every instance I received the first im- 
pulse from Samuel John Mills.” 


In Mills all the fires of the early missionary motives 
and purposes glowed and flamed. Were our “modern 
conceptions” hid from him? On the contrary he too 
had the idea so common in our early missionary litera- 
ture that missionaries were even now accomplishing 
the rich prophecies of the Old Testament, that the 
world was swinging into its divinely appointed orbit 
and that men’s eyes were soon to look out upon a re- 
deemed society on the earth. He imagined the streams 
of Christian charity flowing into our cities and the 
West. No one studied more carefully than he or more 
zealously set forth the social conditions which needed 
to be dealt with in the city slums and on the frontier. 
“Tf an evil exists in a community,” he declared, “a 
remedy must be sought, especially if it be an evil gen- 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS I0Q 


erally and necessarily increasing in its unhappy effects. 
As long as no exertions are made to redress the griev- 
ance, the case must become every day more helpless.” 
He lived for India and Hawaii and America and died 
for Africa. He left home in October, 1816, as he said, 
“with mind ready to embrace any benevolent object 
which should be present and which should demand my 
attention.” Africa was the benevolent object which 
laid hold on him. “My brother,” wrote he to Burgess, 
professor in the University of Vermont, “‘can we en- 
gage in a nobler effort? We go to make freemen of 
slaves. We go to lay the foundations of a free and 
independent empire on the coast of poor, degraded 
Africa. It is confidently believed by many of our best 
and wisest men, that, if it succeeds, it will ultimately 
be the means of exterminating slavery in our country. 
Tt will eventually redeem and emancipate a million and 
a half of wretched men. It will transfer to Africa the 
blessing of religion and civilisation, and Ethiopia will 
stretch out her hands unto God.” So to Africa he 
went, but returned not. The winner of individual souls 
from death and hell had given himself to found a 
people. 

There is hardly a great missionary name among the 
American founders which cannot be called up to sup- 
port the view which is presented here. Two more must 
suffice. 

Of all the missionaries mentioned in this chapter, 
Judson is the one who most fully justifies the current 
view of the character and ideas of the early mission- 
aries. His son said of him, “As a missionary he was 
unwilling to disperse his mental forces over the wide 
surface of literary and philosophical pursuit, but in- 
sisted on moving along the narrow and divinely-ap- 


IIo THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


pointed groove of unfolding the word of God and met- 
ing it out to suit the wants of perishing man.” He 
took up no such activities as Carey and Duff or even 
Brainerd. He declared that the conversion of one im- 
mortal soul in Burmah awakened in him more emotion 
than all the beauty of America. In his first tract for 
the Burmans he wrote that his one motive was this, 
that ‘Being a disciple of Christ, and therefore seeking 
the good of others as his own, he has come, and is 
labouring that the Burmans may be saved from the 
dreadful punishment of hell, and enjoy the happiness 
of heaven.”” And yet he accepted what he conceived to 
be his duty as interpreter and adviser to the British 
envoy in the negotiation of a commercial treaty; he 
produced the Burmese-English dictionary which he de- 
scribed as “‘a causeway, designed to facilitate the trans- 
mission of all knowledge, religious and scientific, from 
one people to the other”; he interposed by law to de- 
liver a slave child from oppression; he deliberately con- 
served the simple social life of the Karens instead of 
artificially westernising it; he relieved the prisoners 
whose lot he shared; and he lived by the supreme social 
law of good deeds. Among his pietistic rules adopted 
on May 14, 1820, he resolved to “embrace every oppor- 
tunity of exercising kind feelings and doing good to 
others.” He readopted this resolution on seven occa- 
sions. And in his tract “The Threefold Cord” he 
wrote, “Do good—all the good in thy power—of every 
sort—and to every person. Regard every human being 
as thine own brother; look with eyes of love on every 
one thou meetest, and hope that he will be thy loving 
and beloved companion in the bright world above. Re- 
joice in every opportunity of doing him any good, either 
of a temporal or spiritual kind.” We have different 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS III 


names for these things now, but do our new names 
cover any more reality? 

The only other American missionary who can be 
mentioned is John Livingstone Nevius. Dr. Nevius 
was known all over the missionary world as the ad- 
vocate of direct evangelistic work for individuals, and 
his name became attached to a method of work which 
reduced missions to the simplest New Testament form. 
Did this exclude the ideal of general service to the en- 
tire community or the conception of society as a body 
to be ministered to? Ask the Chinese or any of the 
foreign merchants in North China who enjoy to-day 
some of the best fruit in the world as the result of Dr. 
Nevius’ work. 


“The improvement of the temporal as well as of the 
spiritual condition of the Chinese was a never-failing 
aim with Dr. Nevius. Many were the seeds, grains, 
trees, and vines he imported and strove to introduce; 
a foreign grain-cradle, and a carriage too. Many were 
failures, but that affected neither his spirits nor his 
efforts.” 


This was the testimony of his closest associate. He 
had grown up on a farm in Seneca County, New York, 
and had an inherited taste for horticulture. He estab- 
lished a model garden, sent to the United States and 
Europe for seeds and plants, developed the trees and 
fruits which would flourish in Shantung, gave grafts 
and scions and seeds to any natives who would ask for 
them, and left behind him when he died many strong 
churches and innumerable orchards and vineyards, all 
alike firmly rooted in the native soil. Huis books show 
what he foresaw to be the course of Christianity in 
affecting the life and institutions of China. 

The men in America who corresponded to Venn were 


I1I2 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Evarts, Lowrie and Anderson. Evarts was a lawyer 
and editor who became the first Treasurer and second 
Secretary of the American Board. ‘Missions to the 
heathen,” he wrote to the Rev. Cephas Washburn, “are 
established with a view to the salvation of perishing 
souls. The object is altogether religious, and should be 
held continually in view.’’ And yet note his conception 
of what this religious object includes. Appealing for 
recruits he writes: 


“Where is the man emulous of a distinction which 
God will approve, and panting after a renown which 
shall never mock the possessor? ... Is he called to 
the high office of a Christian missionary? ... He 
may lay the foundations for Christian institutions that 
shall shed around them a healing power, and remain 
an expression of the divine beneficence to the end of 
time.” 


In an “‘Address to the Christian Public’ issued in 
1812 he declares: 


“Tt is now generally seen and felt, by those who have 
any claim to be considered as proper judges, that Chris- 
tianity is the only remedy for the disorders and miseries 
of this world, as well as the only foundation of hope 
for the world to come. No other agent will ever con- 
trol the violent passions of men, and without the true 
religion all attempts to meliorate the condition of man- 
kind will prove as illusory as a feverish dream. The 
genuine patriot, therefore, and the genuine philanthro- 
pist must labour, so far as they value the prosperity 
of their country and the happiness of the human race, 
to diffuse the knowledge and the influence of Chris- 
tianity at home and abroad. Thus will they labour most 
effectually to put a final period to oppression and 
slavery, to perfidy and war, and to all the train of evils 
which falsehood, ambition and cruelty have so profusely 
scattered through the world.” 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 113 


In the conclusion of his annual survey of the work in 
the annual report of the Board for 1830, he wrote: 


“Christians have for twenty or thirty years past 
distinctly avowed the determination to labour for the 
conversion of the world. They have professed a full 
belief that the time is rapidly approaching when all men 
will be brought under the influence of the Gospel; 
when nominally Christian nations will be so reformed 
and purified that vice and infidelity, and superstition and 
crime, and a merely secular profession of religion will 
have disappeared and been ultimately banished by the 
power of divine truth operating kindly but irresistibly 
through the medium of correct public opinion, per- 
vading a truly virtuous and pious community. In ac- 
cordance with this belief the friends of Christ have put 
into operation certain principles and causes which are 
evidently adapted to change the condition of mankind; 
and the effects of these causes are already becoming 
manifest to the ee $4 


Walter Lown ha been a teacher and surveyor be- 
fore he entered politics and was sent first to the Penn- 
sylvania legislature, then to the House of Representa- 
tives in Washington, and then to the U. S. Senate. 
Upon the completion of his term as Senator, so greatly 
had he commended himself to the Senate that he was 
elected secretary of the Senate and held that office from 
1825 to 1836, when he resigned it to become secretary ” 
of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. As , 
Secretary of the Board he gave three sons to the mis- 
sion work and studied Chinese so as to aid in introduc- 
ing printing from movable type into Chinese which he 
accomplished in conjunction with the British Museum 
and the King of France. 

“The first instruction to be given to all missionaries,” 
he wrote, “is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.” I 


II4 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


have no doubt that he believed in hell but I do not find 
the word in his biography or his papers and addresses. 
He describes Africa and China in his appeals. It is the 
moral and social needs which he depicts. In China he... 
points out that “the rights of the people, and truth and ti 
righteousness are unknown.” 

“Tit Africa he speaks of ‘ ‘the blasting influence of the 
slave trade, breaking up every bond of society, arraying 
the different communities against each other,” the des- 
potism and aggression of the rulers, the degradation 
of “half the community, the mothers of the rising gen- 
eration.”’ Assuredly he set forth the spiritual need, but 
that did not make him incapable of seeing and setting 
forth also the ideals which erroneously seem to us new. 
He anticipated the redemption of human society. As 
Dr. Paxton said in his funeral sermon, “He believed 
that the enthroned Mediator governs the world in the 
interest of the Church, and that therefore the King- 
doms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our 
Lord and of His Christ.” 

The missionaries of the Continent have ever shown 
in their work the combination of the spiritual and the 
practical, the individual and the group conceptions. 
The Moravians have always been instructed to begin 
their work with the direct oral preaching of Christ, but 
‘they have always incarnated that preaching in life and 
deed. The shop and trade and farm have been among 
their accepted modes of missionary service, and they 
have sought to remould bits of society as the nuclei of 
healthy social growth. The Basle mission is a notable 
illustration of the development of community service 
side by side with individualistic evangelism three gen- 
erations ago. Samuel Hebich was a fervent evangelist 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS II5 


of the most simple and primitive type. He laid the 
foundations of the great work of the Basle mission in 
India. How did he lay it? By direct oral preaching, 
indeed. But also by inaugurating the greatest indus- 
trial mission undertakings in the world. He and his 
associates tried raising silk worms, making silk, pre- 
paring arrowroot flour, pressing coconut oil, lacemak- 
ing, carpentering, clock-making, etc., and failed, but 
succeeded with presses, bookbinding, cloth-weaving, 
metal working, tile-making, etc. They developed banks, 
agriculture, building loan associations, insurance. 
They were the inventors of khaki cloth. 

The evidence which has been presented here might 
be multiplied indefinitely. I have confined it to the 
field of the beginning of modern Protestant missions. 
If one were to go back to medizval missions or to the 
later missions of the Jesuits he would make the case 
more ample, but not more clear and strong. The simple 
fact is that the alternative presented in much of our 
criticism of the missionary motive and ideal is an un- 
real alternative. If we could have asked those early 
missionaries whether their motive was to save the peo- 
ple to whom they went from future death or for a pres- 
ent life, and whether their ideal was to reach a few 
individuals or to set free redemptive forces in human 
society which would help to bring in the Kingdom of 
God, they would have answered, “You talk in terms of 
‘either—or,’ with us it is ‘both—and.’ Why do you 
see as mutually exclusive that which with us is com- 
bined in one?” 

Perhaps they would not have answered thus, for 
the forms of our thought would have been unfamiliar 
to them, and they did what they did without self-con- 


116 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


scious analysis of their motives or their aims. They 
did it spontaneously and inevitably for three reasons 
which can be made clear. 

1. Whatever their motive may have been as regards 
the “lost world,” and they believed that in this matter 
they were dealing not less with present moral and social 
facts than with eschatology, their motive as regards 
Christ was unmistakable. They knew Him and it was 
the constraint of the love of Christ, their love of Him 
and their sense of His love for them, which led them 
out as missionaries. And that love is an energy. 
There is more power of living human service in it than 
in all other social ideas whatsover. Bishop Thoburn 
of India set this forth in an address many years ago: 


“Tt is just as natural for one who has the love of 
Christ in his heart,” said he, “if he sees a man hungry, 
to feed him, or to watch with the sick, or to devote 
himself in any way to relieving distress, as it was for 
Christ when He was on earth. And if any one of you 
can fail to relieve suffering when it is within your power 
to do it, let me tell you that you have yet to prove 
that you have the same kind of love in your hearts that 
Christ had. 

“I could give you many illustrations on this point, 
but I will confine myself to just one: You take a young 
man out of this meeting and say to him: ‘You are 
going abroad as a missionary. Don’t be drawn aside 
into other enterprises. Keep to the one thing, the 
preaching of Christ.’ ‘I shall try to do so,’ he says. 
He lands on an Eastern shore and starts up into the 
interior of the country, and at the first river that he 
has to cross, as he goes down to the ferry boat, he finds 
a row of lepers lining the path, and it comes into his 
heart at once that those people should have something 
done for them. He has a new love in his heart as he 
crosses that river, and some day it will take form. 
He crosses the river and goes along the highway, and 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS Ly. 


finds a starving child; the little one says, ‘My parents 
have deserted me and I am dying of hunger.’ He can- 
not pass that child, and yet if he takes the child he 
becomes responsible for its keeping, and he has started 
the nucleus of an orphanage. H2 goes on and perhaps 
finds the parents dying by the roadside. ‘Well,’ he 
says, ‘I must take care of these people.’ And he founds 
analmshouse. He goes on upon his journey and he finds 
the lame, and the sick, and the halt, and the blind, and 
he says, ‘I must relieve these suffering people.’ Then 
he has a medical dispensary and a hospital. They are 
all there before he reaches his station. His friend 
comes out to visit him and finds him thus surrounded, 
and he says: ‘I thought you were going to do but one 
work. I thought you were going to preach Christ.’ He 
answers, “That was my intention, but I couldn’t help 
it.” No. If he had the love of Christ in him he 
couldn’t help it.” 


This is no fanciful view. It is the fact. The mission- 
ary spirit cannot help itself. From the beginning, 
whatever its modes of theological statement or its social 
theory, it has been an irrepressible service of human 
need, in individuals and in communities and in nations. 

2. The social ideal is implicit in the missionary pur- 
pose. The man who sets out to save another man is 
acting socially. His theory may be called individual- 
istic but his act is social. The relationship which he 
takes up is cellular to the Kingdom of God. And also 
the Kingdom can come only as its subjects become 
loyal. And a true mass loyalty is possible only when 
built out of loyal persons. Furthermore, the aim of 
missions to found churches and to relate converts to 
one another in a new unity, was an inherently social 
aim. And beyond this, also, the power of Christianity 
as redemptive of all that it touches is so self-evidencing 
that no thoughtful missionary could escape from dis- 


118 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


cerning that that which results from the Gospel must 
have been of God’s purpose in the Gospel. 

3. The first approach of Christian missions to the 
non-Christian peoples revealed the fact that there was 
no oral medium of communicating the Gospel. Words 
did not exist for many fundamental Christian ideas. 
Words that did exist had an inadequate or misleading 
content. They could not communicate the new truth. 
Words never can communicate new truth. They carry 
the significance not of the speaker but of the hearer. 
It was not as a human teacher, but as the divine in- 
carnation that our Lord brought into the world a new 
conception of God. No teaching could have communi- 
cated that conception. It had to be shown, and Christ 
showed it. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father.” Only by life, to-day, can Christ be preached. 
No words alone can speak Him to men as words can 
speak Him when pictured also in deeds. Many of the 
non-Christian peoples are kindergarten peoples and 
need to be taught by object lessons. Acts must put 
content into words for them. The love of Christ must 
be interpreted to them by the vision of a man in whom 
Christ is loving them. Therefore Adoniram Judson, 
devoted to one thing only, the preaching of Christ, went 
about doing good, and Brainerd showed his Indians 
how to handle their crops, and Carey founded agri- 
cultural societies, and hospitals and homes grew up 
wherever the missionary settled down. 

It is clear that saving men and serving men are and 
have always been inseparable. The contrast between 
them is manufactured. It is uncongenial to Chris- 
tianity. But did these early missionaries have any idea 
of the Kingdom, of the Gospel as regenerative of hu- 
man society? Perhaps they did not often use the term 


THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS  II9Q 


“Kingdom.” Neither did St. Paul. It does not occur 
once in some of his epistles, and, in others, as in the 
single instance in the Epistle to the Romans, it is not 
used in our modern social sense. And neither he nor 
our Lord ever said “social” or “society” or “commun- 
ity,’ nor any of many other words characteristic of 
our contemporary forms of speech as we strive to cor- 
rect and fulfil our own partial thinking about Chris- 
tianity. But the great Christians who founded modern 
missions, whatever may be alleged against their suc- 
cessors, knew the moral and spiritual content of these 
terms and sought in love of God and love of man to 
save men, to serve their generation and to make Christ 
Lord of all. If they did not conceive of the world as 
a Kingdom they did, with St. Paul, think of it or at 
least act toward it as the family of God. 


CHAPTER IV 


New DEMANDS ON THE FOREIGN MISSION ENTERPRISE 
AT THE HOME BASE 


Let us turn to some of the new aspects of the foreign 
mission enterprise at the home base. Outstanding 
among these is the question of the duty of the Church 
to demand of the governments in all Christian lands 
true Christian behaviour in all international relations. 
Any other behaviour on the part of Christian govern- 
ments, or governments that ought to be Christian, hin- 
ders and in some measure nullifies the message of the 
missionary. He is met with the rejoinder, “Physician, 
heal thyself.” The missionary may answer that there 
is no connection whatever between Christianity and the 
governments of Christian lands, but that is a distinction 
hard to make real and convincing to the people. They 
may justly ask to be delivered from the confusion which 
ensues when some representatives of Western nations 
teach one message and live one life and others repudiate 
that message if not by verbal rejection, at least by un- 
Christian behaviour. And they may properly ask why, 
if Christianity is to be accepted by them and Christ is to 
be put in control of their life as individuals and as a 
nation, the missionaries cannot show such a result in 
the lands from which they come. If after many cen- 
turies these lands reject Christianity, or behave in un- 
Christian ways, how can the people of non-Christian 
countries be sure that they are not doing better in re- 


maining non-Christian? The trouble with the contact 
120 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE I2I 


of Christians with non-Christian people is that the mis- 
sionary propaganda is offset and contradicted by our 
non-missionary propaganda both by precept and ex- 
ample. 

The Christian Church has a right to object to this, 
not primarily because it hinders missionary progress 
but because it is wrong. ‘There are very real distinc- 
tions between the functions of Church and State even 
though there is a medial territory where the lines are 
not very definite or clear. But the distinction that the 
Church is Christian and that the State is not, is not 
a valid distinction. In Great Britain and the United 
States the State is Christian in theory and principle. 
At one period of American history the State denied 
this. In the treaty with Tripoli in 1796, it was de- 
clared: “The Government of the United States of 
America is not in any sense founded on the Christian 
religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity 
against the laws, religion or tranquillity of Mussulmans. 
. . « No protest arising from religious opinions shall 
ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing 
between the two countries.” But that view was later 
officially repudiated. The judgment of the United 
States Supreme Court in the Alien Contract Labour 
Law Case, rendered on February 29, 1892, declared 
through Justice Brewer, that the law in question could 
not be operative in the case under consideration—that 
of a minister brought over from Europe to New York 
—on the broad ground that “no purpose of action 
against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state 
or national, because this is a religious people.” What 
religion was meant the Court declared with equal plain- 
ness. It quoted decisions to the effect that Christianity 
is and always had been a part of the common law of 


I22 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


States like Pennsylvania, that the Government is not 
neutral as towards all religions, because we are a Chris- 
tian people, and the morality of the country is deeply 
engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines 
or worship of impostors like Mohammed and the Grand 
Lama. Passing to the view of American life as ex- 
pressed in the laws, its business, its customs and its 
society, the decision finds “everywhere a clear recogni- 
tion of the same truth.” “Among other matters,” it 
says, “note the following: The form of oath universally 
prevailing concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; 
the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies 
and most conventions with prayer; the prefatory words 
of all wills, ‘In the Name of God, Amen’; the laws 
respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with the gen- 
eral cessation of all secular business and the closing of 
courts, legislatures and other similar assemblies on that 
day; the churches and church organisations which 
abound in every city, town and hamlet; the multitude 
of charitable organisations everywhere under Christian 
auspices ; the gigantic missionary associations with gen- 
eral support and aiming to establish Christian missions 
in every quarter of the globe. These and many other 
matters which might be noticed add a volume of unoffi- 
cial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that 
this is a Christian nation.” 

The Christian duty of the State does not rest, how- 
ever, upon court decisions or legislative enactments. 
Nor can these dissolve the obligation. The duty of the 
State to be and to act as Christian is fundamental and 
inescapable. Christ is and has a right to be acknowl- 
edged as the head of the State, and all the acts of the 
State ought to be in conformity with the law of Chris- 
tianity. We may be far away from this to-day. We 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 123 


are far away from it. That is precisely the point I am 
making. The State ought to cease to act in a non- 
Christian way, and the Christian Church in the nations 
which have regarded themselves as Christian ought to 
seek to secure the Christian character and Christian ac- 
tions of the State. 

There may be difference of opinion as to some of the 
ways in which the Christian Church is urged to seek 
these ends. But there are some ways about which 
there is no disagreement. One is the production by the 
Church of individuals who will behave as Christians 
wherever they are and whatever they may do. As mer- 
chants or consuls abroad, as legislators or statesmen at 
home, such men will bear witness to their faith and will 
embody their principles in deeds. Here is room for a 
great body of men who will not be missionaries in any 
professional sense, but who will nevertheless be doing 
the most effective and fruitful missionary service. It 
is agreed also that it is the clear business of the Church 
to proclaim the true principles of human life and rela- 
tionships. And it ought to be clear that this proclama- 
tion must be real, not merely vague and indefinite. It 
is not the mission of the Church to formulate legisla- 
tion embodying the means by which Christian ends are 
to be secured, but it is its mission to describe those ends, 
to show men that they can be attained, and to constrain 
men not to rest until they have been won. From time 
to time also non-Christian things will appear which 
ought certainly to be unmistakably and explicitly de- 
nounced by the Church. Both our Lord and John the 
Baptist had some plain and definite things to say about 
the unrighteousness of the government and the gov- 
ernor under whom they lived, and their Church to-day 
is bound to resist unrighteousness and to exact justice. 


/ 


I24 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


The Churches at home owe a great debt to the missions 
abroad in this regard. Christian missionaries in Japan 
will have a far easier time commending Christianity to 
the Japanese if the countries from which they come will 
behave in a Christian way toward Japan. 

But let us return to the thought that the Christian 
duty of the State is inherent and indisputable. There 
is not one law or one Lord for persons and another law 
and another Lord for societies. There is the one law 
of Christ which is valid for the whole of human life 
and Jesus Christ is the Lord of nations as well as of 
men. This view was clearly and strongly stated at the 
Missionary Convention in Washington in 1925, by the 
Hon. Newton W. Rowell of Canada: 

“A leading statesman of our own day in Europe has 
openly and publicly proclaimed his adherence to the 
Machiavellian ideals of statesmanship; and he is en- 
deavouring to put them into actual practice, both in do- 
mestic and in international affairs. Those who share 
his views would say that he, too, is but recognising the 
hard facts of this present time, and that, however far 
statesmen of other countries may have departed in the 
domestic government of their own states from Machia- 
vellian ideas, they still practise those ideals in interna- 
tional relations, and there may be some justification for 
that view. Machiavelli, while he believed that some 
form of religion was a good thing for the masses of 
the people because it made them more obedient to gov- 
ernments, openly proclaimed himself a pagan; and un- 
doubtedly he drew inspiration for his conceptions of the 
state, its place and its functions, from the pagan ideals 
of ancient Rome. Machiavelli’s conception as applied 
to international relations is essentially pagan in its spirit 
and outlook, and yet, that essentially pagan conception 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 125 


dominated the spirit of international relations for be- 
tween three and four hundred years. 

“Has the Christian Church any theory of interna- 
tional relations? Is there any Christian conception and 
ideal of international relations to set over against the 
Machiavellian and pagan conception? If it has not, if 
it has no substitute to provide, then let it confess its im- 
potence in the face of some of the gravest problems of 
our time. But, if the Christian Church has some theory 
of international relations, which it can set opposite the 
Machiavellian theory, then is it not incumbent upon all 
Christian people to seek to put that Christian concep- 
tion into actual practice? I believe there is a Christian 
theory of international relations. May I venture to 
suggest to you that the thinking of our people will de- 
termine their attitude on these great questions, so that 
it is of fundamental importance that we should have 
a clear conception of what such a Christian theory in- 
volves, and solid ground upon which to stand in con- 
sidering these problems? What lies at the very basis 
of a Christian conception of international relations? 
The President of this Republic, speaking at the Com- 
mercial Club of Chicago on December 4th, 1924, is re- 
ported to have said: 


“T am profoundly impressed with the fact that the 
structure of modern society is essentially a unity, 
destined to stand or fall as such. At the last, those of 
us who are partners in the supreme service of building 
up and bettering our civilisation must go up or down, 
must succeed or fail, together in our one common 
enterprise.” 


“That is a statesman’s form of stating the essential 
unity of our common humanity. The Bishop of St. Al- 


126 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


bans this morning gave us the Christian leader’s form 
of statement of that same great truth, that ‘God hath 
made of one blood all nations.’ We start at the very 
basis of any Christian conception of international rela- 
tions with this fundamental proposition, the essential 
unity of our common humanity, under the Lordship of 
Jesus Christ. 

“And then, what is the next essential element? It 
grows out of the first, a logical development from it. 
It is not the Machiavellian theory that morals have no 
relation to the state of international affairs, but the 
Christian theory that we must recognise the supremacy 
of public right and of moral law in international affairs 
just as truly as in domestic affairs. We can make no 
real progress in dealing with the problems of our time 
unless nations recognise the vital place of the spiritual 
and moral considerations and of moral forces in the 
relation of nation to nation.” Such national fidelity as 
this to elemental Christian principles will be an im- 
mense reinforcement to the effort to carry the Gospel 
to the world. 

Just as there are sure limits to the proper field of 
action of the Church in relation to politics, so there are 
equally sure limits to the proper field of action of the 
State in relation to religion. It is not its business, nor 
the business of its representatives to carry on religious 
propaganda. But likewise it is its business not to hin- 
der such propaganda when it is not subversive of order 
or morals. Whether any particular propaganda is sub- 
versive of morals becomes less and less a question of 
difficulty as the moral conceptions of Christianity come 
to be generally accepted throughout the world. In 
former days a religion forbidding polygamy might have 
been held to be subversive of morals in a polygamous 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 127 


land. And many ideas of one religion have seemed im- 
moral to another. But these difficulties, for the present 
at least, are not serious. As to the question of public 
order, however, the issue is a living one and the world 
will have to face the problem of universal religious lib- 
erty. This principle has been recognised by the League 
of Nations and embodied in the mandates under which 
the colonial administrations affected by the World War 
are now conducted. And the only sure and just way 
to deal with the matter and to secure order and tran- 
quillity is to establish universally the principle of reli- 
gious toleration and freedom. The people of India 
are coming to realise this and to underbuild the civil 
recognition of the principle in India with a genuine 
popular acceptance of it. The Religious Unity Con- 
ference in Delhi in 1924, composed of leading represen- 
tatives of all the religions in India, gave notable ex- 
pression to this view in its resolutions: 


“a. That every individual or group shall have full 
liberty to hold and give expression to his or their 
beliefs and follow any religious practice with due regard 
to the feelings of others and without interfering with 
their rights. In no case may such individual or group 
revile the founders, holy persons or tenets of any other 
faith; 

“b, That all places of worship of whatever faith or 
religion, shall be considered sacred and inviolable and 
shall on no account be attacked or desecrated whether 
as a result of provocation or by way of retaliation for 
sacrilege of the same nature, It shall be the duty of 
every citizen, of whatever faith or religion, to prevent 
such attack or desecration as far as possible, and where 
such attack or desecration has taken place it shall al- 
ways be promptly condemned. 

“h. That every individual is at liberty to follow any 
faith and to change it whenever he so wills and shall 


128 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


not by reason of such change of faith render himself 
liable to any punishment or persecution at the hands of 
the followers of the faith renounced by him: 


cee 


1. That every individual or group is at liberty to 
convert or reconvert another by argument or persuasion 
but must not attempt to do so or prevent its being done 
by force, fraud or other unfair means such as the 
offering of material inducement. Persons under sixteen 
years of age should not be converted unless it be along 
with their parents or guardians. If any person under 
sixteen years of age is found stranded without his 
parents or guardians by a person of another faith he 
should be promptly handed over to persons of his own 
faith. There must be no secrecy about any conversion 
or reconversion.”’ 


To get this view embodied in actual human practice 
will be a long task, but its adoption even in theory has 
been an amazing achievement. 

Where people come thus to a spontaneous acknowl- 
edgment of the right of religious liberty there is no 
need of State action except to bring law into accord 
with sentiment, if indeed law has not preceded. But is 
it not the duty of the world to see that law does precede 
and create sentiment in this matter wherever the prin- 
ciple is denied? Is this not a clear missionary duty of 
the Christian nations, namely, to use their influence to 
the utmost to secure the recognition of religious free- 
dom everywhere? ‘There have been times when some 
_ governments acted under such a sense of duty. Great 
Britain and France and the United States did so in 
1858 in their treaties with China. In these treaties they 
sought to secure religious freedom in China for their 
own nationals but they went beyond this and stipulated 
also for religious freedom for Chinese subjects. And 
the treaty of 1903 between the United States and China 
is even more specific and full. Article 14 of this treaty 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 129 


reads: “The principles of the Christian religion as pro- 
fessed by the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches 
are recognised as teaching men to do good and to do to 
others as they would have others do to them. Those 
who quietly profess and teach these doctrines shall not 
be harassed or persecuted on account of their faith. 
Any person, whether citizen of United States or Chi- 
nese convert, who, according to these tenets, peaceably 
teaches and practises the principles of Christianity, shall 
in no case be interfered with or molested therefore. 
No restrictions shall be placed upon Chinese joining 
Christian Churches. Converts and non-converts, being 
Chinese subjects, shall alike conform to the laws of 
China, and shall pay due respect to those in authority, 
living together in peace and amity; and the fact of 
being converts shall not protect them from the conse- 
quences of any offence they may have committed before 
or may commit after their admission into the Church, 
or exempt them from paying legal taxes levied on Chi- 
nese subjects generally, except taxes levied, and con- 
tributions for the support of religious customs and 
practices contrary to their faith. Missionaries shall not 
interfere with the exercise by the native authorities 
of their jurisdiction over Chinese subjects; nor shall 
the native authorities make any distinction between con- 
verts and non-converts, but shall administer the laws 
without partiality, so that both classes can live together 
in peace.” 

The United States acted again under the sense of 
duty in behalf of religious tolerance when during Presi- 
dent Grant’s administration the Japanese Government 
revived the old proclamation in prohibition of Chris- 
tianity. Mr. Seward was then Secretary of State, and 
he wrote that the President “regards the proclamation 


I30 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


as not merely ill-judged but as injurious and offensive 
to the United States and to all other Christian states, 
and as directly conflicting with the Eighth Article of 
the Treaty of 1858, and no less in conflict with the tol- 
erating principles and spirit which prevail throughout 
the world. You are advised, therefore, that the United 
States cannot acquiesce in or submit to the Mikado’s 
proclamation.” The American Government acted in 
the matter yet again in the revision of its treaty with 
Siam in 1920. Under this new treaty Americans sur- 
rendered their extra-territorial rights in Siam. The 
treaty provided for the toleration of religion in the case 
of Americans in Siam, and it made use of the follow- 
ing ingenious language: “The citizens and subjects of 
both the High Contracting Parties shall enjoy in the 
territories and possessions of the High Contracting 
Parties entire liberty of conscience, and, subject to the 
laws, ordinances and regulations, shall enjoy the right 
of private or public exercise of their worship.” The 
Siamese Government unhesitatingly accepted this form 
of statement so that this treaty is a recognition of the 
right of religious freedom of Americans in Siam and 
of Siamese in the United States; but it is more than 
that. Itis a reciprocal declaration of the religious free- 
dom of Americans in America and of Siamese in Siam. 
What objection could there be to such reciprocal 
treaties with China in place of the treaties of earlier 
years? 

From the beginning, Great Britain has pursued the 
policy, with some few limitations, of religious freedom 
in all its own territories, and long ago went beyond 
this to maintain the rights of subjects of other States 
to religious freedom in their own States. 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 131 


“Tn 1853, when the British and French fleets were in 
the Turkish waters for the protection of Turkey, a 
young man was judicially condemned to death and 
publicly executed in Adrianople, by the Ottoman 
authorities, for the crime of having apostatised from 
Islam to Christianity. He had openly declared that 
Christ was the true Prophet, and that, having Him, he 
had no need of Mohammed, who therefore was a false 
Prophet. He was cast into prison and cruelly tortured 
to induce him to recant, but in vain. On being be- 
headed, he exclaimed with his last breath, ‘I profess 
Jesus Christ, and for Him I die.’ On September 17, 
1855, the Earl of Clarendon, Minister of Foreign 
Affairs, wrote to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the 
British Ambassador at Constantinople: ‘The Christian 
Powers, who are making gigantic efforts and submitting 
to enormous sacrifices, to save the Turkish Empire 
from ruin and destruction, cannot permit the continu- 
ance of a law in Turkey, which is not only a standing 
insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their 
co-religionists, which they never can consent to per- 
petuate by the successes of their fleets and armies. 
They are entitled to demand, and Her Majesty’s Gov- 
ernment do distinctly demand, that no punishment 
whatever shall attach to the Mahometan who becomes a 
Christian. The same noble language of Christian 
patriotism had also been held earlier by the Earl of 
Aberdeen, who wrote to Sir Stratford Canning on 
January 16, 1844: ‘The Christian Powers will not en- 
dure that the Porte should insult and trample on their 
faith, by treating as a criminal any person who em- 
braces it.’ The intention was to induce the Porte to 
renounce and abrogate the law in question. But the 
spirited correspondence with the Turkish Government, 
even under those exceptionally favourable circum- 
stances, led to no greater result than that, early in the 
year 1856, a Memorandum was agreed upon containing 
these words: ‘As all forms of religion are and shall be 
freely professed in the Ottoman dominions, no subject 
of His Majesty the Sultan shall be hindered in the 
exercise of the religion that he professes, nor shall be 


132 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


in any way annoyed on this account. None shall be 
compelled to change their religion.” The discovery had 
been made that the objectionable law, being regarded 
as invested with a divine character, could not be an- 
nulled or abrogated by any human authority whatso- 
ever. Therefore, the British Ambassador considered it 
best to advise his Government to be content with the 
aforementioned clause, saying in his despatch to the 
Earl of Clarendon, dated February 12, 1856: ‘The law 
of the Koran is not abolished, it is true, respecting 
renegades, and the Sultan’s ministers affirm that such a 
stretch of authority would exceed even His Majesty’s 
legal powers. But, however that may be, the practical 
application of it is renounced by means of a public 
document, and Her Majesty’s Government would at 
any time be justified in complaining of a breach of en- 
gagement if the Porte were to authorise or to permit 
any exception to its own official declaration.’ (Koelle, 
“Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” page 474.) 


In the Treaty of Berlin, into which England, Austria, 
Russia, France, Italy and Turkey entered in 1878, it is 
declared in Article 2 that complete religious liberty is 
to exist in the various territories mentioned in the pre- 
ceding article, “including the whole Turkish Empire.” 
The 62nd article begins: “The Sublime Porte, having 
expressed its willingness to maintain the principle of 
religious liberty and to give it the widest sphere, the 
contracting parties take cognisance of this spontaneous 
declaration.” The work of the West in this matter is 
not ended, however. “In spite of the reiterated declara- 
tions,’ says Dr. Barton, “it is evident that the Turkish 
Government does not and never did intend to acknowl- 
edge the right of a Moslem to become a Christian. A 
high official once told the writer that Turkey gives to all 
her subjects the widest religious liberty. He said: 
‘There is the fullest liberty for the Armenian to become 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE D353 


a Catholic, for the Greek to become an Armenian, for 
the Catholics and Armenians to become Greeks, for any 
one of them to become Protestant, or for all to become 
Mohammedans. There is the fullest and completest 
religious liberty for all the subjects of this empire.’ In 
response to the question, ‘How about liberty for the 
Mohammedan to become a Christian ?’ he replied : ‘That 
is an impossibility in the nature of the case. When one 
has once accepted Islam and become a follower of the 
Prophet he cannot change. There is no power on earth 
that can change him. Whatever he may say or claim 
cannot alter the fact that he is a Moslem still, and 
must always be such. It is, therefore, an absurdity to 
say that a Moslem has the privilege of changing his 
religion, for to do so is beyond his power.’ For the 
last forty years the actions of the official and influential 
Turks have borne out this theory of religious liberty 
in the Ottoman Empire. Every Moslem showing in- 
terest in Christian things takes his life in his hands. 
No protection can be afforded him against the false 
charges that begin at once to multiply. His only safety 
lies in flight.” (Barton, “Daybreak in Turkey,” p. 
BRO MTS Ye ei 

But all religions should be free to appeal to men, 
provided they do not assail the moral axioms of life, 
as no religion can which will command the assent of 
men in a free society. And only those institutions 
ought to be free to endure which can command the loy- 
alty of free men. It is not the duty of the Western 
nations to annihilate one another’s nationality or the 
nationality of the non-Christian nations, but it is their 
duty to demand that the human spirit in all lands shall 
be free to think its own thoughts and pursue its own 
worship of God. 


134 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Let us turn from the consideration of this duty of 
the home Churches in their relation to the character and 
functions of their governments in their relation to for- 
eign missions and examine the question whether the 
present situation in foreign missions calls for any mod- 
ification of our conception of the enterprise or of the | 
motives relied upon to sustain it, or of the methods to 
be used in its prosecution. It may be well to summarise 
some of the views now put forward. Some hold that 
the old idea of missions as the offer of something which 
we have to people who do not have it is essentially un- 
sound; that the true way to conceive missions is in 
terms of quest. We go out to join with the earnest 
spirits of other religions in a common search for some- 
thing which as yet neither we nor they have found. 
Some raise the question in a somewhat different form 
and ask whether we really have a religion worth carry- 
ing to other nations or with sufficient motive power in 
it to bear it over the seas and make it effective in other 
lands. Some maintain that the old individualistic con- 
ception of seeking to convert individuals is an anachro- 
nism and that we should seek now rather to Christianise 
the world order and national institutions and social and 
economic relations. And some add that this work is so 
far from being done in the West that until it is done 
here we cannot hope to do it elsewhere and that it is 
hypocritical to undertake it. Some put the matter 
otherwise. The work to be done, they say, is a uni- 
versal work. It differs not at all in India from the 
United States. The concept of “foreign missions” is 
unreal. The old world with which Carey dealt is not 
our modern world. There is nothing foreign any more. 
As a weekly religious paper puts it: “The distinction 
between home and foreign Christian effort is a false dis- 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 135 


tinction. There is no such thing as foreign missions. 
... Lhe attempt to separate Kingdom work into 
geographical divisions will break down through its own 
artificiality.” Some declare that the indigenous 
Churches which have been established are the agencies 
which should now be conceived as responsible for the 
work of evangelisation, and that foreign missions 
should be auxiliary to them and subject to their deter- 
mination and control, and that the Western Churches 
should look to these new Churches for counsel and 
authority. Some argue that missionaries of the old 
type are no longer needed, that the motives which pro- 
duced them have lost their vitality, and that the modern 
world calls rather for missionaries in the steel trade, 
in engineering, in diplomacy, in commerce, in social 
reform. The list of questionings and restatements 
might be indefinitely prolonged. 

With regard to the fundamental questions raised, 
back of all transitory forms of expression, three things 
may be said: 

First, it is interesting to note that almost every aspect 
of these statements can be duplicated from the discus- 
sions of a century ago. There is hardly an objection 
made to the foreign mission enterprise in its present 
development that could not have been made and that 
was not made long ago. If these objections had been 
consulted by the founders of modern missions the enter- 
prise would never have been begun. If it were not in 
existence to-day it would not be started by those who 
think of foreign missions as a search for truth, or who 
wonder whether the Christian Churches of the West 
have anything to give the rest of the world. There 
were doubters a century ago who saw no reason for 
specialising foreign missionary effort but who argued 


136 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


for a general Christian conception of the Church’s task. 
There would have been no foreign missions if men like 
Carey had not begun them as a distinct and geographi- 
cally foreign undertaking. Those Churches are doing 
most of the work to-day who conceive it still clearly and - 
veraciously as a task that is special and distinct. To 
blur this over has as yet one sure result. The work is 
not done. 

Whether there are still vital missionary motives in 
such Christianity as we have is not a matter of specula- 
tion. It is open to the test of fact. There are more 
missionaries than there ever were and more money is 
given to missions than has ever been given. It is easy 
to ascertain who are going and what their convictions 
are and who are not going and what their convictions 
are. And it is easy to discover also where most of the 
support comes from. It is from men and women who 
believe that Jesus Christ is the only hope of the world. 
Where that conviction remains, the springs of foreign 
missions remain open and rich. 

In the second place, we need to remind ourselves of 
the actual facts of our real world. The world is a good 
deal bigger thing than the knowledge and outlook of 
any single individual are competent to take in. And 
while in one sense it is a steadily shrinking and dimin- 
ishing world, in another sense, equally true, it is a con- 
stantly enlarging world, growing in population and 
complexity. Those students and writers of the mission- 
ary enterprise who speak as though they saw the whole 
of it and could crowd it all into one formula, whether 
old or new, are self-forgetful. Neither Peking, nor 
Shanghai, nor Calcutta, nor New York, nor London, 
nor Berlin, nor Rio, nor Buenos Aires, nor Cairo, nor 
Cape Town is the whole world, nor are the back cran- 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 137 


nies of Persia or Afghanistan or Mongolia, or of 
Cameroun, or Nigeria, or of central South America. 
Neither is the whole of the problem of any one part 
of the world to be stated in terms of one social class or 
of one set of relationships, economic or political. 
There are all stages of human life to be found in our 
wide and various world and the foreign missionary en- 
terprise may be ending at one place when it is only be- 
ginning at another. There are fields where it has fin- 
ished its work and withdrawn as in Hawaii, in many 
parts of North America and in centres in other lands. 
But there are other areas where its work has only begun 
or has not yet been begun at all. These statements are 
true whether we conceive fields in a geographical sense 
or in terms of forces, human groups, or ranges of 
thought and ideal. 

A. few illustrative cases of unoccupied and of un- 
reached peoples must suffice. Several winters ago I 
crossed Persia twice. One journey was directly west 
from Meshed on the border of Afghanistan to Tabriz 
on the border of Turkey and Russia. Between Meshed 
and Teheran we travelled for more than six hundred 
miles through deserts but also through pleasant valleys, 
villages, and cities and there was not one Christian mis- 
sionary or preacher, foreign or native, in the whole re- 
gion. From Teheran again we travelled three hundred 
miles west to Tabriz without finding a missionary or 
evangelist or teacher of any kind. There are 60,000 
uncared-for lepers in South America. Some of our 
Presbyterian mission stations in Shantung, China, have 
each a population to evangelise equal to the population 
of California, Indiana or Michigan. Would these 
states be deemed adequately occupied by Christian 
forces on this basis? In India there are single mis- 


138 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


sionaries who have districts of three quarters of a 
million people and five hundred villages. To talk of the 
evangelisation of these regions as the business of “the 
native Church demanding its recognition and rights” is 
the language of sheer uninformed formularists. There 
is no native Church in these Persian towns and cities 
outside of the half dozen mission stations. Some day, 
please God, there will be such a Church. But if a mis- 
sion field where there is neither missionary nor native 
Church is not an unoccupied field, what is an unoccu- 
pied field? If such a field is, there are a thousand such 
waiting. 

I am writing this chapter on a steamship bound for 
the South American Christian Congress at Montevideo 
and have just this moment been reading the Report of 
the Commission on the Indians. “It is estimated,” says 
this report, “that about 55 per cent. of the population 
of Peru is Indian, i.e., about 2,500,000; that in Bolivia 
about 50 per cent. of the population is Indian, and 27 
per cent. a mixed race with Indian blood and character 
predominating, amounting in all to about 1,500,000; 
that in Ecuador the Indians number about 75 per cent. 
or 1,200,00.” And this Report proceeds to summarise 
the evidence from South American sources regarding 
the conditions of these Indians. Their “chief vices are 
alcohol and coca, both of which produce terrible havoc. 
... Lhe great majority of the Chuncho savages are 
stn worshippers. It would be vain to deny that the 
Quechua Indian is an idolater at heart. . . . In the 
celebration of religious observances the Indian finds his 
deepest degradation.” The Report indicates what is 
being done by the State, by the Roman Catholic Church 
and by the Protestant forces but it is an account of “the 
petty done, the undone vast.” 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 139 


One could go on indefinitely describing concrete situa- 
tions which call as definitely for the extension of for- 
eign missions to-day as the world of Carey’s time called 
for their establishment. To one who knows these sit- 
uations from having seen them the view of some Chris- 
tian people that there is no longer any need for foreign 
missions, that the rising native Churches are ready now 
to take over the work, that the differentiation of mis- 
sions as foreign is no longer valid—is a simply incredi- 
ble view. 

The strongest and oldest of the indigenous Churches 
bear the strongest testimony to the apparent inevitable- 
ness of the present missionary methods and to the need 
of the maintenance and great enlargement of the for- 
eign missionary force. Some years ago Indian Chris- 
tians organised the National Missionary Society of In- 
dia to be supported and staffed wholly by Indians and 
to be conducted on Indian methods. All friends of the 
Indian Church watched the development eagerly. The 
Society has done useful work but its methods have been 
an exact duplication of the methods of the Missions 
and its reports recognise the immense areas of unmet 
need. In Japan the strongest appeal for missionary re- 
inforcements has not come from the Missions but from 
Japanese leaders. “If we understood rightly the real 
need,” writes Dr. Ebina, “we would not hesitate to ad- 
vocate a fourfold increase of missionary forces—forces 
sufficient to make short work of the evangelisation of 
Japan. Then Japan as a converted nation would her- 
self become the vanguard of the missionary forces on 
the Asiatic Continent.” 

These unoccupied areas are only part of the task. 
They are far greater than the adequately occupied 
areas, but there are two other and perhaps even more 


140 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


significant summoning fields. In the first place there 
are the ideas, forces, relationships, classes for which the 
missionary work remains to be done and on some of 
which the missionary obligation remains to be laid. It 
is not easy in connection with these to determine how 
much of the task belongs to the native Church and how 
much to the Western Church and how much to the 
State and how much to society. And even when it is 
clear that some piece of work is legitimately the work 
of the Western Church as such and not the work of 
Christians functioning as citizens in the discharge of 
civic duties, there is the still further question as to 
whether the work to be done by the Church belongs 
to it as a whole or to its foreign missionary agencies. 
There are some who argue that all the work of the 
Church must be one and that the differentiation of 
foreign missions is improper. ‘This is not, however, a 
new position. It was the position of many of the early 
opponents of foreign missions. Those who maintain 
it to-day do so in the avowed support of foreign mis- 
sions, but they do not realise that whatever need existed 
for foreign missions as foreign a hundred years ago 
exists to-day, plus much more need. The truth which 
underlies their view is that for the sake of foreign mis- 
sions as well as for the sake of the work of the Church 
at home there is a deeper and more urgent need than 
ever for the full discharge of all Christian duty in 
Church and State, in the individual and in society, at 
home and abroad. 

In our national bearing and spirit toward other peo- 
ples, in the character of our commercial and industrial 
relationships, in the care of unfortunate classes like 
the diseased, the leper and the blind and the outcasts, 
in education and public health and child welfare, in 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE I4!I 


inspiring sacrifice and effort and loyalty and hope 
Christianity has vast opportunities as yet unrealised in 
which the general missionary spirit finds a new call and 
which in large part, though only in part, fall to the 
specific enterprise of foreign missions. 

The other and greatest of all the unoccupied areas is 
in human life and personality itself. After all, the 
greatest need is qualitative not quantitative. It is not 
for more men and women so much as for more man 
and woman, or, to put it better, for more surrender of 
life to the use of God and more appropriation of the 
unlimited power that there is in God for the use of 
man. St. Paul meant more to the permanence and per- 
petuation and power of Christianity than a hundred or 
a hundred thousand common men. Both in the mis- 
sions and in the native Churches the supreme need and 
call are for men like him, Perhaps we deem this im- 
possible, but we have always to reckon with that search- 
ing and summoning word of Christ, “He that believeth 
on Me the works that I do shall he do also and greater 
works than these shall he do.” This promise opens up 
the greatest unoccupied field in the world. 

The occupation of this field will have revolutionary 
effects. It will upheave our missionary methods and 
our criticisms of them. It will send out pioneers into 
waste places. It will break up complacency and tradi- 
tion. It will show that impossibilities are easy. It 
will end small prejudices and the sense of race domina- 
tion and of race subjugation, and of the use of race as 
a cover either for assertion or for delinquency. It will 
enable men to see the greatest need and to give them- 
selves to it. It will convince them of the conscience 
and the cross of Christ. 

In the third place it is to be observed that the foreign 


142 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


mission enterprise itself supplies the valid elements in 
the considerations which are now under discussion. It 
has been insisting from the outset that the peoples who 
have acquired any privileges or power should recognise 
the truth of human unity and the duty of human service 
and bring all humanity into the common experience of 
its common wealth. It is demanding to-day that Chris- 
tianity should be given control of the whole impact of 
nation on nation and race on race the world around. 
It argues for the world-wide extension of the Gospel 
because only so can any of the peoples of the world 
know its fulness. The complete glory of the Lordship 
of Christ can be realised only in a world where every 
people and every tribe actually crown Him Lord of all. 
It has striven generation after generation to build up 
the national Churches to which it can pass over the bur- 
den which it has borne and which will take up the 
burdens which do not belong to and can never be suc- 
cessfully assumed by foreign missionaries. Now that 
these Churches are, all too slowly, coming into being, 
so far from being reluctant to recognise them or to be- 
come subordinate to them, the joy of foreign missions 
is fulfilled. The friend of the bridegroom rejoices to 
hear the bridegroom’s voice. It cannot be heard too 
soon, in its acceptance and recognition of the worthi- 
ness and attraction and sufficiency of the Church in each 
land made ready for Him. No agency will be more 
ready and eager to welcome its euthanasia than foreign 
missions, when their work is done and they can give 
way to national Churches co-operating with the 
Churches of the West in the universal and continuing 
work of the Kingdom of Christ in the world. If to 
any extent the Christian conceptions with which we 
have worked in the missionary enterprise in the past 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 143 


have been inadequate, then as they expand under the 
larger experience of the Church and the teaching of the 
Spirit of Christ and approximate more closely to the 
full truth, to that extent they ought to result, and if the 
process is a true one will result, not in any impoverish- 
ment of the missionary motive but in its enrichment, 
not in the contraction of the enterprise but in its great 
and adequate expansion. Only those can fail to wel- 
come such a development who, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, are in reality out of sympathy with the effort 
of the Church to seek literally to fulfil the essential 
genius of Christianity and its final summary expression 
in the last commission of our Lord. 

In the following chapter we shall note the relation- 
ship of the foreign missionary enterprise abroad.to the 
race problem, There are foreign missionary aspects of 
that problem which fall also to the Churches at home. 
Mr. Rowell referred to them in the same address which 
we have already quoted: 

“We acknowledge allegiance to our city, and our 
duty and responsibility as citizens. We acknowledge 
allegiance to our state or province, and our duty and 
responsibility as citizens in the state. We acknowledge 
our allegiance to our national government, and our duty 
and responsibility as citizens to that government. We 
do not find that the one allegiance conflicts with the 
other. The man who is the best citizen in the com- 
munity, in the city, is the best citizen of the state and 
in the nation. We are not required to do away with 
these allegiances, but, recognising their full force and 
power, we need to add to them one other, our allegiance 
to the cause of humanity under the leadership of our 
Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 

“And that carries with it obligations just as binding, 


144. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


just as inescapable for every honest Christian man and. 
woman as the obligation to the city or the state or the 
national government. We think of our city as a unity, 
we think of our state as a unity, we think of our nation 
as a unity. We must broaden our horizon and take in 
the sweep of all the nations; we must think of our hu- 
manity as one great unity, the children of a common 
Father, bound together by the ties of human brother- 
hood. This was that great conception which St. 
Augustine set forth in “The City of God,’ that great 
conception of the world-wide unity which dominated 
the thought of Europe for one thousand years. In 
modern times the spirit of nationalism has led us away 
from that great Christian ideal. The problem we face 
to-day is how to reconcile and harmonise the two—the 
idea of nationalism with that of world-wide unity—to 
recognise the facts and forces of to-day, and yet inspire 
all men with the Christian spirit and the recognition of 
the unity of our race. How then are the relations of 
the members of the family of nations to be governed? 
I have already pointed out that there must be the rec- 
ognition of public right, the moral factor in the relation 
of nation to nation. There must be an earnest and 
honest effort to understand and appreciate the point of 
view of other races and other peoples. We cannot un- 
derstand each other and work together as different races 
and different nations, unless we honestly seek to under- 
stand and appreciate the point of view of other peoples.” 

Do the new conditions of the missionary work in 
foreign lands call upon the Churches at home to pro- 
vide a different type of missionary, or missionaries with 
different kinds of preparation and qualifications from 
those required in the past? To be specific, is it the fact 
that the work calls now not for the old general train- 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE I45 


ing and for missionaries to settle down for permanent 
evangelistic work or to devote themselves for life to 
whatever forms of service press themselves upon them, 
but rather for men and women of specialised training 
for specialised forms and for definite positions and per- 
haps not for permanent service at all but to accomplish 
a temporary task and then return home? Yes and no. 
There is a limited call for service from young men and 
women who may not be able to give more than a few 
years or who are uncertain as to where their duty may 
lie, but who wish to see and judge for themselves as 
to the claims of the foreign field. In places where ex- 
perience and knowledge of the language are not essen- 
tial but where work can be done in English under the 
supervision of experienced workers, a few of these 
short term workers may render useful service. Beyond 
this there is and will be increasing opportunity for serv- 
ice from the ablest men and women of each national 
Church, West or East, in visiting for longer or shorter 
periods the churches and institutions of the other. The 
best leaders of the Churches on the mission field may 
bring help and support to us. And scholars, lecturers, 
teachers, doctors and many other competent men and 
women from the West should go out to the Mission 
fields, some for brief visits, others for longer periods. 
The world is growing ever more compact and easy of 
access, bound together in common thoughts and ac- 
quaintance, and the barrier of language becomes less 
and less. The best Christian scholarship and apologetic 
of the West should be carried to other countries not 
in books only but personally by our ablest teachers and 
preachers. There ought to be also a great supple- 
mentary lay mission. No one could estimate the value 
to Christian missions to Asia and other lands of our 


146 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


best Christian laymen who would go out to testify 
clearly and boldly to their Christian faith. It is to be 
hoped that the day will soon come when such forms of 
service as these and others like them and such general 
financial help as our Western Churches may give in the 
way of brotherly aid to be administered, if it is needed 
at all, wholly by the new Churches, may take the place 
of the foreign mission enterprise in its present form. 
But we have not reached that day. And there is as 
great need now as ever of the enterprise in the form 
and with the forces which we know to-day. Indeed, Dr. 
Ebina has said that these forces should be multiplied 
fourfold in the case of Japan, if we are to achieve the 
desired goal when the native Christians can take over 
the task with only supplementary aid, if aid at all, from 
without. The real work must still and for some time be 
borne by the men and women who go out to learn the 
language and to become a permanent part of the life of 
the people. That does not mean that more and more 
the places of leadership, college presidencies and pro- 
fessorships, evangelistic superintendence, executive ad- 
ministration, shall not be in native hands as in the case 
of all congregational pastorates. But for a long time 
yet medical leadership and organisation, many educa- 
tional positions and the responsibility for unceasing 
pioneer expansion and for the relentless prosecution of 
the supreme ideal of the evangelisation of all lives and 
of all life, will call for the maintenance of foreign mis- 
sions and for a continuous supply of the same kind of 
men and women who have gone in the past. There can 
be and there ought to be now in the enlarged and com- 
plexly developed work, abroad as at home, the greatest 
amount of competent and specialised equipment. A 
way must be found, however, abroad as at home, for 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 147 


holding all such specialised service as true as the old 
general type of service to the great central missionary 
aims, and it could be wished that specialised skill might 
be obtainable without too great cost in general sym- 
pathies and adaptation and efficiency. It is clear that 
we have lost as well as gained much in our present 
educational ideals and processes. The net result has 
surely been gain. The older missionaries themselves 
are eager to bear their testimony to the energy, flexi- 
bility and effectiveness as well as the devotion of the 
new generation which has grown up. Whether we 
shall hold these gains and augment them will depend 
upon the life of the Christian Churches at home. The 
missionaries who go out cannot be better than the best 
of the home Church. Will that best be good enough? 

The contention that the missionary and educational 
task of the Church is indivisible and undifferentiated, 
that the terms “foreign” and “home” should be elim- 
inated, and that the whole work of the Church at home 
and abroad should be conceived as one, is in one view 
a thoroughly sound contention. It should be ceaselessly 
urged against the disposition to slight any section of 
the great mission of the Church in the world. But it is 
not a practicable principle on which to organise ad- 
ministration or to conduct actual achievement. If 
there is not specialisation of effort and responsibility, 
it is inevitable that the work will not be done. The 
Churches have acted with wisdom, accordingly, in es- 
tablishing boards and agencies to care for the different 
aspects of their work which call for separate adminis- 
tration. Where the Churches have failed to provide in 
this way for any real task which was suffering over- 
sight and neglect, agencies have inevitably been devel- 
oped, independent or semi-independent of the Churches, 


148 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


to meet the necessity. At the present time in many of 
the Churches we are witnessing a curious anomaly. 
These Churches are offering themselves as adequate 
agencies of religious activity able and ready to provide 
for all the work which it is the duty of the Church to 
do, and yet at the same time they are proposing plans 
of consolidated benevolence which are intended to pool 
the gifts and work of the Church and to equalise its 
activity on some basis of mathematical proportions. 
Under these plans the individual donor will cease to 
designate the use or object of his gift and will leave it 
to some central agency of the Church to apportion. 
Something is to be said for this plan and something 
against it. Probably the right answer to it is that each 
Church may well lay upon each of its members the 
duty of some proportionate contribution to all its work. 
This should be the minimum gift of each man propor- 
tioned in his own conscience to his ability. But beyond 
this minimum and standard offering every individual 
Christian ought to be free, and as a responsible trustee 
ought to be encouraged to use his power, not as pre- 
scribed by some one else, but as led by his own con- 
science and intelligence and personal interest. Nothing 
could be more suicidal than the course which some are 
advocating, in America at least, of a common benevo- 
lence pool which would discourage the individual from 
the careful personal administration of his gifts and 
which would hinder any agency of the Church, whether 
its work is at home or abroad, from presenting its case 
with maximum power. 

A problem like this and many other problems, both 
administrative and doctrinal, may become simply signs 
of waning momentum, or a case of energy diverted 
from the objective task and absorbed in the mechanism. 


NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 149 


Our supreme need is for a Church which has not begun 
to speculate and argue over things that should be taken 
for granted, which is so bent on accomplishing certain 
great ends which are agreed upon that it cannot stop 
to dispute and differ over subordinate issues, however 
important, upon which there may be disagreement. It 
is a curious thing that the less important the end or 
issue the wider is the basis of agreement required by 
men ; while the vaster the stake the less exacting the de- 
mands. In the face of a pestilence a whole community 
will act as a unit which will divide hopelessly into fac- 
tions over the location of a monument or the cutting 
down of a tree or the music in a church. The Church 
needs the sense of a vast enterprise, simple, urgent, de- 
manding all that war demands and demanding far more, 
because it asks of love what war draws from hate and 
fear. If the Church is to be saved it will be by the 
spirit of such a great unselfish world service, not by 
introspection, or a return upon history or the effort to 
purge herself by inward debate and recrimination. Let 
the Church rise and move and we shall know what ele- 
ments in her are true and what are false by the place 
they will press to fill in her advancing assault upon all 
evil, in her self-forgetful realisation of the unity of 
love, in her exaltation of Christ, His Cross and His 
Throne. 


CHAPTER V 


NEw DEMANDS ON THE MIssSION FIELD CREATED BY 
New Wor.tp ConpDITIONS 


Tue line of distinction between this and the preceding 
chapter is not as clear as the titles of the two chapters 
might suggest. It is not easy to separate the home 
problems from the foreign problems or to distinguish 
the influences which condition each set of problems, but 
there is perhaps enough difference to justify separation 
of the two chapters. 

First there are the new educational problems. When 
missionary education began in many fields there was no 
other education offered. There may have been old 
style schools like those of the Confucian system which 
have now almost completely disappeared but which for 
centuries covered the whole of China, reaching to every 
country village; or like the Madresseh, the ecclesiastical 
or semi-ecclesiastical schools in Turkey, or like the 
temple schools in India. But there were no modern 
educational institutions. And the state system of edu- 
cation had not yet begun. In China Dr. Mateer’s school 
at Tungchow, in Shantung, and Dr. Sheffield’s at 
Tengchow, in Chihli, in North China, and the schools 
of the London Missionary Society in Hong Kong, were 
the first institutions to provide modern education. In 
India, Carey at Serampore and Duff in Calcutta, were 
in the field long before government. In many cases the 


missionary schools prepared the way, worked out the 
150 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD I5I 


principles and provided the first models. Now and 
then missionaries believed that they saw a greater op- 
portunity for dispelling error and diffusing light by 
withdrawing temporarily or even permanently from 
direct missionary service in order to aid the govern- 
ment to begin their systems of education. Carey did 
this while still remaining a missionary of the Seram- 
pore brotherhood, but Verbeck and McCartee went over 
for a time wholly to the service of Japan to begin the 
work which later developed into the Imperial Univer- 
sity in Tokyo. Verbeck’s work is well-known, but Mc- 
Cartee’s was useful also. “His good work for the edu- 
cation of Japan in the first stages of its development,” 
said Viscount Tanaka, then Vice-minister of Educa- 
tion, “‘can never be forgotten.’ Martin went to the as- 
sistance of China to found its institution in Peking 
known as the Tungwen College, designed “to train 
young men for the public service, especially as agents 
of international intercourse,” and never conceived that 
he had abandoned his character as a missionary. In 
his old age and retirement he returned to honorary 
membership in his own mission in Peking. 

Not only did missionary education fill this honour- 
able place in the origin of modern education in many 
lands but in some of them it has retained the leadership. 
In South Africa the Scotch Missions at Lovedale and 
Livingstonia provide the best education available for 
African young men and women, and Mr. Charles T. 
Loram, Inspector of Schools, Natal, says quite plainly: 
“The history of Native education in South Africa is 
the history of South African missions, for it is due 
entirely to the efforts of the missionaries that the Na- 
tives of South Africa have received any education at 
all, and to this day all but three of the several thousand 


I52 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Native schools are conducted by missionary agencies.” 
(‘Education in South Africa,” p. 46.) 

In the Near East the best educational institutions 
have been and are the Christian schools, the American 
Universities at Beirut and Cairo, Robert College and 
the American College for Women in Constantinople, 
the American Mission schools in Teheran and Tabriz. 
In the Philippines the missionary institution at Duma- 
guete is recognised to be the best in the archipelago 
outside of Manila. In some of these cases the mission 
institutions have been left with the whole field their 
own. Elsewhere this has not been the case. 

Schools under government or other auspices have 
grown up to share the work, but the missionary schools 
have still held their ground. They have done so in 
India. The Madras Christian College and the Forman 
Christian College and others like them are not sur- 
passed, and sometimes are not equalled, by any of the 
other colleges embraced with them in the provincial 
universities. In China the missionary universities were 
far in the lead and in some provinces still hold their 
own, as in Shantung, Fukien, Canton, Szchuen and 
Hunan. At Peking and Nanking the government uni- 
versities, not without foreign assistance in various 
forms, and with official support and government re- 
sources, are already beginning to overtop the two mis- 
sionary universities. 

Is this not the inevitable and the desirable develop- 
ment everywhere? Is it not the proper and necessary 
function of the state to provide for the education of 
the children? This has been the German and the Amer- 
ican view and increasingly also the British view. In 
any case the Protestant foreign missionary enterprise 
has never conceived it to be its duty to claim the pre- 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 153 


rogative of controlling the education of a nation. It 
has no permanent responsibilities. Its work, however 
long continued, must in the end be a temporary work. 
Its business is to found the Christian Church, to give 
all the help it can to the Church, to individual men and 
to society and its institutions and relationships, and 
to conclude its distinctive work as soon as it can, leav- 
ing behind it the agencies and forces and ideals essential 
to Christian life in individuals and society. The prob- 
lems involved inthe international and inter-racial rela- 
tionships ensuing may be spoken of as foreign mission- 
ary but they will represent an entirely different phase 
and will not require the present forms of organisation 
or policies of procedure. The fact that such a different 
situation is ahead of us and is to be longed and wrought 
for must not hide the fact that it will not come unless 
a great many things are done first which some good 
people are not only overleaping but even depreciating 
as though they were already done or were dispensable. 
They are neither. 

But we shall return to this elsewhere. It is enough 
to point out here that the educational work of Missions 
does not involve any jealousy of government education 
or any effort to obstruct it. On the contrary, mission- 
aries have always done their utmost to encourage and 
aid the government. Their conviction is that the more 
freely truth can be diffused the better. All that they 
dread is error or half truth or the suppression of truth. 
The Christian Church is the mother of education and 
nowhere more clearly than in the foreign mission field. 
And foreign missions rejoice to see adequate educa- 
tional systems projected and developed in the fields 
where they are at work. 

All that they desire in the midst of this development 


154 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


is first the opportunity to be of real service to the coun- 
try to which they have come with no other desire than 
the desire of true helpfulness, and second the freedom, 
which we believe is a just freedom, to teach the Chris- 
tian religion to those who may be willing to receive 
such teaching and especially to begin to train for 
largest usefulness the children of the Christian Church. 
The danger which confronts the foreign mission enter- 
prise to-day is that in one or both of these respects its 
educational activity may be wiped out. 

On the one hand the tendency to nationalise educa- 
tion is in danger in some lands of being carried so far 
as to make education the monopoly of the state, or if 
private education is allowed at all to require it to con- 
form absolutely to state standards. This was the pro- 
posal in Chosen in 1914, when the Japanese administra- 
tion sought to bring all the schools into absolute 
conformity to a rigid system of instruction, curric- 
ulum, text books, organisation, etc., which included the 
abandonment of required religious teaching. There 
had been for a time some disposition to pursue this 
policy in Japan itself but it had been deliberately aban- 
doned there and the government, instead, both then and 
later, followed a generous policy of encouraging private 
education both in great universities like Waseda and 
Keio and in mission schools from lower grades to lower 
university rank, like Doshisha, and subsequently other 
institutions. After a few years also in Chosen itself 
Japan relaxed the restraints and moved toward the en- 
lightened course which she had adopted at home. The 
Indian Government has been moving in the direction of 
a far closer control of higher education by the state. 
Hitherto the provincial universities have been examin, 
ing and degree-conferring bodies like the University of 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 155 


London, with a few university chairs. But now the 
constituent colleges, where the reformed scheme has 
gone into effect, as in the United Provinces, are re- 
duced to intermediate colleges, the upper two years hav- 
ing been transferred to the university as a teaching 
body. This takes all higher education out of the hands 
of private colleges, whether Hindu, Mohammedan or 
Christian. The one recourse open is to found a dis- 
tinct religious university as the Mohammedans have 
done at Aligarh and the Hindus at Benares. Private 
education is left free, however, from the intermediate 
college down. The most stringent control of private 
education at present is in Turkey. No new foreign 
schools are permitted. Many old ones have been 
closed. Those which are still tolerated are governed 
by the most exacting requirements as to hours, lan- 
guage of instruction, ages of pupils, passage from class 
to class. Teachers appointed by the government but 
paid by the school are imposed for certain subjects. A 
resident of Syria who has had close contact with the 
educational situation in Turkey, writes in a letter dated 
March 6, 1925: 


“Tn all Turkish primary schools, both public and spe- 
cial, the only language allowed is Turkish, regardless 
of what language the children use at home. Religious 
instruction may be given to the children of the faith 
of the founders of the particular school, Catholic to 
Catholic children, Moslem children from Moslem 
founders, Protestants in the same way. It was a very 
special concession obtained only after very hard work, 
that the Syriac community in Mardin got permission to 
teach a little Syriac on the ground that it is the language 
employed in the church ritual and hence necessary. All 
primary schools must have one or more Moslem Turk- 
ish teachers appointed by the government as must also 


156 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


the high schools. The policy about paying these gov- 
ernment appointed teachers varies. In some cases the 
government pays them and in others the founders of 
the school must do so. In high schools Turkish must 
be the language of instruction but languages may be 
taught as languages. All schools are subject to govern- 
ment inspection at all times to see whether these gov- 
ernment instructions are being carried out as required.” 


There are leaders of public education in China who 
would go still further. At the meeting of the Na- 
tional China Educational Conference at Kaifeng, the 
capital of Honan province, in October, 1924, these were 
some of the resolutions adopted: 


“After full examination of the whole problem (that 
of schools organised by foreigners in China) we report 
on the necessity of the government’s regaining control 
of all educational activities now exercised by foreigners 
in China. Foreigners in China, in the conduct of their 
educational work, exhibit many evils, of which the four 
following must be emphasised: 

“TI. In every country education is a most important 
inner function of government. The schools operated 
by foreigners are not registered with the government, 
nor do they receive or observe the government instruc- 
tions. This gradually alienates the government’s ex- 
clusive right to educate. 

“TI. Each country has some ruling idea on which 
it builds its educational fabric. Foreign races by 
temperament and ideals are different from our people. 
The education of each country is, or should be, pecul- 
larly fitted to each; thus no other can quite harmonise 
with our needs. This means that they interfere with 
the attainment of our educational ideal. 

“III. Moreover, by the conduct of their peculiar 
systems they really buy the affections of our people, 
making them in reality colonists of their countries. 
Though this may not be the intent, no plan could have 
been more cunningly laid, for the change is all uncon- 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD I57 


sciously going on. Thus those educated under a Japan- 
ese system learn to love Japan. So for England, Amer- 
ica, and France. Thus the peculiar national spirit of 
independence and the student’s mind, that should be 
first for his country, is impaired. Thus the content of 
the system of education devised by foreigners is ap- 
parent. The administrators of the schools are either 
preachers of religion, or they occupy their positions for 
the purpose of inculcating political ideas; the educa- 
tional is not their real aim. As far as method goes they 
follow their own inclinations and ideas. The curric- 
ulum is not in harmony with the government standards. 

“IV. For the above reasons necessity presses that 
the government should regain its rightful control of 
education. Means to this end are as follows: 

“tT, All schools and educational agencies established 
by foreigners should report to the government for 
registration. 

“2. Everything pertaining to the schools should be 
brought into harmony with national and provincial 
regulations before they are permitted to register. 

“3, All schools opened by foreigners must come 
under the control of an inspector appointed by the local 
magistrate. 

“4. All teachers employed in foreign schools must 
have the qualifications required by the Ministry of 
Education. 

“5. All foreign schools must collect fees in accord- 
ance with the scale set by the Ministry. Such scale of 
fees must not exceed that of other private schools in the 
district. 

“6, Pupils graduating from an unregistered school 
shall not be considered on an equality with the gradu- 
ates of the national schools when seeking government 
preferment. 

“7, Schools not permitted to register by the govern- 
ment shall be closed after a certain time, of which due 
notice shall be given. 

“8. Students in the foreign schools shall take care 
to observe all festivals, properties, and manners deter- 
mined for the regulation of the national schools. 


158 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


“9. Foreigners should not use their schools or other 
educational agencies for the propagation of religion. 

“to, All foreign schools and educational agencies 
shall, within a fixed time, be taken over by the nation. 

“t1. After the foregoing has become law in opera- 
tion, no foreigner shall be permitted to establish agen- 
cies in the country.” 


And while this group represented at the time a very 
radical view and their resolutions are not government 
enactments, such a responsible and foremost scholar as 
Dr. Hu Suh, professor of Philosophy in the National 
University in Peking, supports their declaration of the 
desirability of divorcing education from all religious 
propaganda. Oregon and Nebraska, until overruled by 
the United States Supreme Court, proposed this same 
absolute state monopoly or control of some forms at 
least of education, advocated by the Kaifeng Confer- 
ence. 

Many forces have led on to this ultra-nationalistic 
feeling in education—the evidence of the power of gov- 
ernmentally controlled and directed education in the case 
of Germany prior to the war, the modern manipula- 
tion of propaganda and group psychology, the effort 
on the part of one or another section of opinion to use 
government mechanism for making itself dominant, 
the fear of foreign or sectarian influence introducing 
itself under economic, religious, philanthropic or educa- 
tional guises, the sense of national weakness or vanity 
on the one hand or of pride and confidence on the other, 
whether well or ill-founded. But whatever the forces 
back of it, it is a blunder when applied indiscriminately 
to education. In Great Britain and the United States 
and Canada we are convinced that it is both wise and 
obligatory on the part of the state to make room for 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 159 


private education. Much of our educational progress 
and most of our new ideas in education have been 
worked out by private schools unbound by the rigid 
standardisation and policy of state education. The 
state will lose more than it will gain by repressing the 
life and freedom of private schools. 

It is quite legitimate for the state to establish min- 
imum requirements as to equipments and efficiency and 
degrees, and mission schools should not complain of 
these. But the state, especially in Asia and many other 
lands, too, needs the work which mission schools can 
do in establishing in each land a model Christian school, 
adapting western education to the life of the land or 
seeking to meet special needs in special fields of educa- 
tional experiment, such as rural education in India, in- 
dustrial education in Africa, medical education in China 
and Syria. In asking this opportunity of service of 
these nations they are asked for nothing more than 
is accorded to them. 

The missionary view of the right ideal and aim of 
education as a missionary agency was set forth by the 
General Board of the Christian Educational Associa- 
tion in China, at its meeting in April, 1925, “in view of 
widespread misunderstanding and not a little mis- 
representation of the purpose of Christian education in 
China”: 

“t. THE FuNcTION oF CHRISTIAN ScHoors. The 
special function of Christian schools, and the main 
justification for their maintenance supplementary to the 
public schools of China, is that they provide an educa- 
tion Christian in character for the children of the mem- 
bers of the Christian community and for others who 
desire to avail themselves of private schools of that type. 


“9. PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN A Democracy. It is in 
accordance with the spirit of democracy and with the 


a 
« 


*, 


160 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


practice in all democratic nations of the modern world 
that permission should be granted to individuals or to 
special groups, who so desire, to establish and maintain 
private educational institutions, in addition to the public 
system of education maintained by the State. ‘This 
right is granted on condition that these private schools 
maintain the minimum standards legitimately imposed 
by the State upon all schools, both public and private, 
and that they do not conflict with the interests of the 
nation and of society as a whole. 

“3, PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND ProcreEss. It is generally 
agreed that progress in education is dependent upon 
the existence of diverse types of schools and the largest 
possible freedom of variation. To deny the right of 
variation, and to insist that all schools follow the same 
uniform procedure, would be contrary to the educa- 
tional interests of the State. Provided that private 
schools meet the essential requirements of all schools, 
the greater the freedom of variation allowed, the better 
for education, and for the State. 

“A, PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 
The maintenance of private schools in which religion 
forms an integral part of the educational process, is in 
accordance with the principle of religious freedom, 
which has been accepted in the constitution of the Chi- 
nese Republic, and with the practice in other democratic 
nations. Religious freedom includes not only the right 
of the individual to follow his own conscience in mat- 
ters of personal religious belief, but also to provide 
training in religion for his children. This principle 
applies equally to the adherents of any religious faith. 

“5. CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND THE NATIONAL PRo- 
GRAMME OF EpucaTion. It seems advisable that pri- 
vate schools in China should come under the cognisance 
of the public educational authorities and form part of 
the national programme of education. Such a relation- 
ship would naturally take the form of registration of 
the schools, the adoption of the essentials required for 
all schools, the attainment of recognised standards of 
efficiency, and a system of visitation to insure the main- 
tenance of these standards. Beyond this there should 


NEW DEMANDS ON, THE MISSION FIELD 161 


be freedom. Christian educators welcome such a rela- 
tionship with the public educational authorities. Such 
supervisory control of these schools as is maintained by 
Christian agencies is solely for the purpose of promot- 
ing efficiency and is meant to supplement, not to take 
the place of, the general supervisory relation of the pub- 
lic educational authorities. 

“6, ETHICAL AND RELIGIouS TEACHING IN CBRIS- 
TIAN ScHoots. The primary purpose of all education 
is the development of personality and of moral charac- 
ter, and it is in this sphere that Christian people believe 
that they have a special contribution to make to the life 
of China. The insistence by the educational authori- 
ties upon conditions of registration that imposed re- 
strictions upon the ethical and religious teaching and 
life of the Christian schools, would not only be incon- 
sistent with the principles of educational and religious 
freedom, but would prevent these schools from achiev- 
ing the purpose for which they have been founded, and 
from making their distinctive contribution to the educa- 
tional needs of China. 

“7, CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND PatTrioTIsM. The 
Christian spirit naturally expresses itself in an en- 
lightened patriotism. Christian schools aim to develop 
in their students the love of country; if they fail to do 
so, they are to that extent untrue to their purpose. 
The idea of ‘denationalising’ students, or of using the 
Christian schools as the agencies of a ‘foreign im- 
perialism’ is abhorrent to the leaders in Christian edu- 
cation, both Chinese and westerners. 

“8. CHRISTIAN EpucaTiIon BECOMING INDIGENOUS. 
While Christian schools in China were originally estab- 
lished and are still largely maintained by foreign mis- 
sionaries and their supporters in the west, their purpose 
has been to serve the best interests of the Chinese peo- 
ple. It is their ideal, which is being increasingly real- 
ised, that Christian education should become Chinese in 
spirit, in content, in support and in control. ‘This is 
the expressed purpose not only of Chinese and western 
Christian educators, but also of the mission bodies 
which have in the past supported the Christian schools, 


162 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


and of the Chinese Christian community which is 
gradually taking over their support and control. 

“go. THE PERMANENT FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN 
EpucaTion. The permanent maintenance of Christian 
education depends upon securing the whole-hearted 
support of the Christian community and of enlightened 
Chinese public opinion in general, not only treaties be- 
tween China and other nations.” 


» This educational problem is one of the two great 
‘educational problems before missions to-day. It in- 
‘volves, to be sure, many other problems such as our 
ability faithfully to fulfil the promise of such service 
as this if the opportunity is given to us. Are we pre- 
pared to unite our forces, as we must if this work is to 
be adequately done, and are we bent upon doing noth- 
ing but earnestly and effectively helping the nation to 
which we have gone? We ought to be able to answer 
these questions without hesitation or uncertainty. And 
we ought to strive to make our service so good and 
desirable that the people will want it. Experience has 
shown, however, that we may do this and still have to 
face political hindrances and opposition. We can only 
meet these as they arise in patience and prayer and love. 

The other of the two educational problems is equally 
serious, namely, the problem arising when missionary 
schools are still allowed to exist, but when their freedom 
of religious teaching is conditional or abridged or 
denied. This was the case in Japan for a short time in 
1902-1903, when the educational authorities then in 
control denied the privileges of postponement of mili- 
tary service and of equal opportunity for the advance- 
ment of students into government schools of next 
higher grade, to institutions which made religious 
teaching a part of the curriculum or required attend- 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 163 


ance at chapel service. The same pressure was exerted 
in Chosen later when it was required that schools ad- 
mitted to government registry and sanction should re- 
move religion from the regular course of instruction. 
In Turkey to-day no teaching of religion is allowed in 
schools except the religion of the pupils, Islam to 
Moslems, Christianity to Christians. The agitation of 
1924-25 in China against all foreign influence, includ- 
ing foreign established and aided education, was 
directed specifically also against the use of education in 
any religious interest. The resolutions adopted at 
Kaifeng, as we have noted, included the following: 
“Foreigners should not use their schools or other educa- 
tional agencies for the propagation of religion.” 

The problem in India has taken a different form. In 
the past there has been no national state-supported sys- 
tem of education in India nor is there to-day. The plan 
adopted was the grant-in-aid scheme, under which the 
government established the standards and encouraged 
private initiative and gave subsidies from public funds. 
Under the new diarchy system of government, educa- 
tion is made a provincial affair and in each province is 
included in the departments transferred to Indian con- 
trol. In some of the provinces the continuance of the 
grants-in-aid has been made conditional on the 
acceptance by each aided institution of the so-called 
“Conscience Clause’? which allows the institution to 
give religious instruction and to hold religious worship 
only for those pupils whose parents do not request ex- 
emption, and only apart from the regular required 
curriculum. 

The question which missions face accordingly in 
different forms are such as these: What is the aim of 
missionary education? What are its relations to evan- 


164 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


gelistic purpose and result? Do different principles 
govern the use of missionary gifts from the home 
Churches from those which apply to the use of educa- 
tional funds received on the field from fees or grants? 
Does required religious teaching accomplish better mis- 
sionary results than optional? If so, whose option 
should be consulted, the pupil’s or, as in India, the 
parents’? Can Christians do anything that is not Chris- 
tian; if so what is and what is not a Christian school ? 
If missionary schools give up their religious teaching, 
whether required as some insist they shall, or even 
optional as others demand, will there be adequate justi- 
fication for their existence, will the people who support 
missions support such schools, will the native Churches 
maintain them, or will the State itself long refrain from 
absorbing them, as the Chinese educators propose? 
These questions would draw out diverse answers. But 
it may be maintained that sooner or later only those 
schools will be maintained, or can maintain themselves, 
which can justify the contribution which they are 
making to the achievement of the great Christian aims. 
The diversity of our interpretation of those aims will 
produce similar diversity in our answers to these ques- 
tions. Those missionary societies will accomplish most 
which actually do succeed in producing the truest Chris- 
tian leaders and in releasing the forces of Christian life 
and faith in society. And this will probably result not 
so much from any particular methods as from love, 
courage, veracity, from Christian faith and influence, 
uncompromised and unconcealed, and working in fear- 
less unselfishness and efficiency. 

The problems of missionary education fundamentally 
are religious and educational problems. They do not 
differ in these respects essentially from the problems of 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 165 


Christian education at home. And as we have seen, 
even in their political aspects, mission schools are only 
facing the same issues which have been raised in states 
like Oregon and Nebraska and in European countries 
where the educational freedom of minorities has been 
limited or refused. All over the world this old problem 
of the relation of politics and religion, of the State and 
the Church, is as living and perplexing as it has always 
been. The missionary movement has been inevitably - 
involved in it from the beginning. In the medizval 
period, as we have seen, religion and politics were again 
and again inextricably commingled or even identified. 
The first Roman Catholic missionaries were the con- 
quistadores, or went with them, both helped and hin- 
dered by them. Spanish and Portuguese conquest 
meant nominal Christianisation. In the eighteenth 
century even Schwartz was forced into political rela- 
tionships between the East India Company and Hyder 
Ali. Carey’s location at Serampore was determined by 
political exigencies and likewise Judson’s in Burmah. 
The same treaties which opened China to trade after 
the opium war opened it to missionary residence, and 
the treaties of 1858 covered both commercial and 
religious liberties. There is no escape from all this 
confusion. The most unworldly missionaries are not 
allowed to travel without passports of the nations to 
which they belong. And those who conceive their er- 
rand in the most spiritual terms are again and again 
involved in the complications inseparable from life in 
an organised, unitary human society. Dr. Lobdell and 
the early American missionaries in interior Turkey and 
Mesopotamia were separated from the home policies of 
the United States by the width of the world, but they 
could not restrain their testimony on the issue of 


166 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


slavery. The China Inland missionaries seek most 
earnestly to preserve their work absolutely disconnected 
with politics and so do the American Missions in Japan. 
None the less the work of both of them is radically 
affected by the conduct of the nations from which they 
come, by the policy of Great Britain with regard to the 
Boxer indemnity Fund in China and by the immigration 
policy of the United States toward Japan. 

The questions which are at issue here are not dis- 
tinctly foreign missionary questions, They are the old 
and still unsolved problems of the relations of Church 
and State, by no means solved by the formula of “a 
free Church in a free State,”’ nor by the conception of 
the spirituality of the functions of the Church. Be- 
cause, in the first place, the State also has a spiritual 
foundation and spiritual functions, and in the second 
place, the Church cannot evade the facts of life or 
escape the responsibility for actualising its spiritual 
principles in human conduct and relationships. In the 
foreign field the difficulties of the home problem exist, 
increased by the fact that there are two States involved 
and sometimes two Churches, the State and the Church 
from which the missionaries come and those also to 
which they go. Here and there, as in the case of Trum- 
bull in Chile and Verbeck in Japan, the missionary gave 
up his old citizenship and became naturalised in his new 
home. That both simplifies and complicates the prob- 
lem. As yet we have no solution for it. It remains 
even where the missionary operates in his own nation, 
though as a foreign missionary, as in the case of St. 
Paul in the Roman Empire or Sheldon Jackson in 
Alaska. 

Without venturing into all the debatable questions 
which lie in this field it must suffice to suggest one 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 167 


guiding principle and one point of present missionary 
policy, The guiding principle is the Lordship of Christ. 
That principle, however far we are from acknowledging 
it, is the supreme principle which ought to govern both 
State and Church. All action of the State at variance 
with it is wrong or imperfect. At present no state 
professes to act under it, certainly not the non-Christian 
nations and equally certainly not the so-called Christian 
nations. Either type of nation may now and then doa 
Christian thing. But all nations ought to do nothing 
but Christian things. The Church has a right to hold 
up before them always this ideal and to do this effec- 
tively she must hold it up to herself, and pre-eminently 
foreign mission agencies; and the Churches which 
grow out of them, though it is far harder for them 
than for the great Churches of the West, must live by 
the Christian law and under One Lord. The race issue 
offers one test in this regard. 

But it is easy to slip over into unreality, into a 
theoretical construing of actual conditions which 
assumes as present what lies far off in the future. The 
proper emphasis on social conceptions and on the wider 
relation of the Church in each nation and internationally 
involves as a necessary and fundamental implication 
the prior bringing into being of the personalities on 
which alone general movements and influences can be 
borne. No one can say how many of these may be re- 
quired. Our Lord was but one and in the generation 
following there was only one St. Paul. But then also 
it was not in the lifetime of either of these that the 
social effects of the Gospel were achieved except in 
individual persons and in the small separated Christian 
communities. In the Mission field to-day we are often 
expecting and demanding of Christianity more than has 


168 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


yet been given starting point and fulcrum in actual per- 
sons, or than can be produced without the ripening of 
time. In China, for example, a social demand is made 
upon the nation also, to save the nation by some pro- 
cess or programme when as a matter of fact the living 
persons and the substantial character without which 
all processes and programmes are merely academic, are © 
not yet produced. The base of converted individuals is 
not yet broad and solid enough to sustain a new social 
order. The most fundamental and glorious of all the 
purposes of Christianity still calls to be done, the crea- 
tion of Christian men in numbers and quality adequate 
to furnish the foundation stones of a new building. 
If the Christian Church forgets this, she will be like a 
mason trying to carry up walls which rest on no 
sufficient base. 

These educational and political problems of foreign 
missions to-day are supplemented by a third which 
grows ever more acute and also more familiar, namely, 
the new form of apologetic attack and defence. At 
the beginning of foreign mission work, in all but the 
Mohammedan fields, the missionaries encountered 
frank and untroubled idolatry, philosophies which 
might or might not have points of contact with western 
thought, but in either case were unaware and careless 
of it. The virtues and might of western civilisation 
were claimed for Christianity while its vices and weak- 
nesses were as far as possible, and in many places with 
full success, disavowed. On the whole Christianity 
appeared as identified with civilisation, and in a few 
places even western names and garments were given to 
non-Christians. The non-Christian religions were not 
in all cases what they had always been, for they had 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 169 


passed through many changes and some were less and 
some were more fitted to cope with Christianity by 
reason of these changes, but all were as yet unin- 
fluenced by Christianity itself and met it on the ground 
on which it then found them. In all these regards, 
and many more beside, the situation is wholly changed 
to-day. 

The non-Christian world knows Christendom and 
Christianity to-day with a very different knowledge 
from that which it received from the first or even 
later missionaries. A host of representatives from 
the western nations has gone out all over the world, 
some of whom have confirmed and supported the mis- 
sionary but most of whom in the past have discredited 
or denied his message. Many of these have done it by 
their own bad lives, but many others and in increasing 
numbers have done it in honest disbelief. They have 
created or confirmed the view that Christianity is out- 
grown and discarded at home. Western education 
which has rejected the Christian faith has assured Asia 
that it should not take up an outgrown superstition. 
Multitudes of students from non-Christian lands have 
gone abroad with results of deepest consequence to 
Christianity. For a time these students went, ten 
thousand at a time, from China to Japan, and came 
back detached from whatever religion they may have 
had and especially set against Christianity. It is be- 
lieved by some that the radical movement against for- 
eign and Christian education in China in 1924-25 came 
from men for the most part educated in Japan. But 
thousands more of the student class, not from China 
alone but from all lands, have thronged to Europe and 
America. There were about 12,000 such students in 


170 THE, CHURCH, AND MISSIONS” 


the United States in 1925. Over 400 jews students 
have been enrolled in the University of Edinburgh 
alone. 

Our western life and the Christian Church have 
never met a more severe and searching trial than they 
are meeting to-day in the presence of these foreign 
students in our schools. These young men and women 
from many lands are testing the honesty of the political 
and social axioms which have constituted our Ameri- 
can and British tradition. They are proving the reality 
of our profession of Christian brotherhood and 
equality. Almost all of them came here full of confi- 
dence and hope. Many of them are going back dis- 
illusioned, some bitter, some sorrowful. Many of 
them received their first shock at the port of entry as 
they came in. Some of them went on and met with the 
very evils which they had come to the West to trans- 
cend. Some found that the Christianity which they had 
acquired from missionaries was not confirmed by the 
Christianity which they met in the land which had sent 
the missionaries forth. 

Not all have been disappointed. Thousands of them 
have gone home with strength and faith, having re- 
ceived that for which they came. They were able to 
distinguish between good and evil and to understand 
the struggle which was going on in our own national 
character. They met with people who did embody in 
their own lives and in their attitude and spirit toward 
others the Christian ideals of justice and equality and 
goodwill. And especially, ever since the days of Yung 
Wing and the students whom he brought from China, 
have those foreign students returned with what they 
came fer and what Britain and America were meant to 
give them, who found their way into western Christian 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD I7I 


home-life and saw the real springs of our national 
spirit. 

For the failures among these students the blame is 
not all on one side, but the larger responsibility is 
ours, and it is high time that the nation and the Church 
realised what the situation is and comprehended the 
test and the opportunity which it presents. For it is an 
opportunity. We have never had a greater one. Not 
another year should be allowed to pass without an 
adequate effort on the part of the nation and the Chris- 
tian Church to deal with it. We can, if we will, send 
back each year to their many lands an army of am- 
bassadors of goodwill and helpful intercourse, of inter- 
national confidence, of hope and peace. And the 
Church may find in these thousands of students as 
many missionaries to carry Christianity back to their 
own people. They will not carry back what they do 
not get, and they will not get what we cannot or do not 
give. 

Most powerful of all things in discrediting Chris- 
tianity and weakening the force of the missionary’s 
presentation has been the example of the nominally 
Christian nations. Long before the World War, Lord 
Salisbury candidly acknowledged this in a speech be- 
fore the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 
London: 


“In the Church of old times, great evangelists went 
forth to this work, exposed themselves to fearful dan- 
gers and suffered all the terrors that the world could 
inflict in support of the doctrines which they preached 
and the morality which they practised. There was no 
doubt at the same time, a corrupt society calling itself 
by their name. But ... the means of communication —- 
were not active and were not as they are now, and 


172 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


things might go on without attracting the attention of 
those who listened to the teaching of the earlier teach- 
ers or diminishing the value of their work. Now things 
are considerably altered, and that very increase in the 
means of communication, that very augmentation of 
the power of opinion to affect opinion and of man to 
affect man by the mere conquests we have achieved in 
the material domain; those very conquests, while un- 
doubtedly they are . . . an invitation from Providence 
to take advantage of the means of spreading the Gospel, 
are also a means by which the lives of many and the 
acts of many, which are not wholly consistent with the 
ideal which is preached in the pulpit or read in the 
Holy Book, are brought home to the vast nations which 
we seek to address. That is one of the great difficulties 
with which we have to contend, and that is the reason 
why this society and all missionary societies appeal with 
undoubted force and with the right to have their appeal 
considered—that as our civilisation in its measure tends 
to hamper missionary efforts, so in its nobler manifesta- 
tions and its more powerful efforts that civilisation, 
represented by our assistance, shall push forward to its 
ultimate victory, the cause to which you are devoted.” 


The conduct of Christian nations has displayed, since 
Lord Salisbury made this speech, a huge mass of in- 
consistency with the principles and spirit of Christ. It 
may be that statesmen have done their best, and one 
could even credit them with an honest effort to do right 
and still be unable to break the force of the feeling of 
the non-Christian world that, if modern politics em- 
body Christianity, the non-Christian world may have to 
adopt the politics but will abhor the religion which 
they embody. 

“The European War,” said a Hindu, Mr. Natarajan 
of Bombay, “and no less the European Peace, have dis- 
credited the Christianity of the Churches. The 
Christian missionary has no chance of getting a hear- 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 173 


ing now, unless he distinguishes between Christ and 
Christianity and between Christianity and western 
civilisation. The material wealth, the political power 
and the dazzling civilisation which at one time undoubt- 
edly helped Christian missions in this country, have 
now become his great hindrance. Some missionaries to 
my knowledge used to descant on these things as the 
results of Christianity, and point the moral to Indians 
that the adopting of Christianity would lead to political 
power and material wealth. This was obviously wrong. 
In any case the wheel has turned and the Christian mis- 
sionary has rather to apologise for western civilisation 
as the term is ordinarily understood. ‘That is not his 
only difficulty.” (‘“Mahkzan i Masihi,” Sept. 1, 1923.) 
There may be great injustice in the present judgment of 
the non-Christian peoples upon western states. There 
is no doubt also great injustice in the judgment of the 
West upon the East. The one point urged here is that 
missions have to meet a new apologetic situation. 

It is on the whole of advantage that they should have 
to do so. It has been long foreseen and foretold that 
some day missions would have to meet the nemesis of 
this old confusion of Christianity and civilisation. It 
will do us all good to take whatever punishment is due 
us and to think out more carefully the right line of 
advance in the future. It is curious to note that some 
of those who are most strenuous in their demand for 
the socialisation of the missionary movement and of 
its motives and aims to-day are most severe in their 
criticism of those forms of the movement in the past 
which it took when it most closely conformed to this 
principle. They would have missions transfer their 
centre of gravity from the distinct Christian com- 
munity where the social problems are worked out in 


174 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


the definite social cell of the Church, to society at large, 
where the risk of those very confusions and compro- 
mises which have encumbered the past is greatest. (The 
path of true advance is probably neither this path nor 
the opposite but a resultant of the effort of good and 
earnest people struggling forward to one goal by diverse 
roads of approach. 

In no respect is the apologetic situation of missions 
more altered than in the attitude and temper and charac- 
ter of the non-Christian religions. Mr. Gandhi is re- 
ported to have said recently, “I cannot tell where my 
Hinduism leaves off and my Christianity begins.” No 
one can tell. Christianity has exerted a positively 
transforming influence on the thought of all other 
religions. Amir Ali Syed’s “Spirit of Islam’ purports 
to be a statement of Mohammedanism, but it is a state- 
ment which could never have been written except by a 
man who was not himself unaware where Moham- 
medanism left off in him and Christianity began. 
From first to last it is an unconscious attempt to Chris- 
tianise Islam. Let any one take Rabindranath Tagore’s 
writings and compare them with Indian literature be- 
fore Christian ideas penetrated and pervaded it and 
what has happened will be as clear to him as daylight. 
All such transformations of the old religions by Chris- 
tian truth is to be welcomed. It is inevitable in any 
case. This is one of the ways in which the great end is 
to be won. Sir Charles Trevelyan, a far greater and 
better man than any one would ever judge from the 
caricature of Sir Gregory Hardlines in Anthony Trol- 
lope’s “The Three Clerks,” put the matter in prose as 
a result of his long experience in India: 


“Many persons mistake the way in which the con- 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 175 


version of India will be brought about. I believe it 
will take place at last wholesale, just as our own an- 
cestors were converted. The country will have Chris- 
tian instruction infused into it in every way by direct 
missionary education, and indirectly by books of vari- 
ous sorts, through the public papers, through conversa- 
tion with Europeans, and in all conceivable ways in 
which knowledge is communicated. Then at last when 
society is completely saturated with Christian knowl- 
edge, and public opinion has taken a decided turn that 
way, they will come over by thousands.” 


But Clough has put it even better in familiar lines: 


“Say not the struggle nought availeth, 
The labour and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
And as things have been they remain. 


“Tf hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
It may be, in yon smoke concealed, 
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers 
And, but for you, possess the field. 


“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 

Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 


“And not by eastern windows only, 
When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
But westward, look, the land is bright.” 


The great growth of the missionary enterprise and 
the measure of success which it has achieved in the 


-accomplishment of its primary aim to establish in- 


digenous Churches have brought new problems of 
relationship. One is the relation of the foreign mis- 


176 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


sions of different denominations to one another. The 
other is that of the relation of the foreign missions to 
the native Churches. 

At first the foreign missions were in large cities 
where there was room, without overlapping or friction, 
for many bodies to work as though they were in al- 
together different parts of the world and also the 
agencies were few in number. In 1854 there were 18 
foreign missionary societies with 395 missionaries and 
21,299 native Christians in India. In 1881 there were 
48 societies with 1,278 missionaries. Now there are 
304 societies with 5,682 missionaries. In China there 
were in 1854, 18 foreign missionary societies with 120 
missionaries. In 1877 there were 473 missionaries, 
and now there are 138 societies with 7,663 missionaries. 
In Shanghai in 1870, there were 26 missionaries of 8 
societies. Now there are 673 missionaries resident in 
Shanghai, representing 51 Protestant agencies. In 
South America there were in 1870 a handful of mis- 
sionaries of a few societies. Now there are 1,736 
missionaries of IIO societies or denominations. It is 
obvious at once that new problems of relationship have 
grown up here, due simply to the enlargement and 
proximity of the missionary forces of different 
Churches. 

These missionaries are not truly representing Chris- 
tianity if they are not seeking in every way they can to 
work together. They are indeed working together 
more closely every year. But how closely can they 
come together? Ought they to conduct as far as they 
can union institutions and seek to found only one 
native Church in each land? Some earnest missionary 
leaders like the late Bishop Bashford of China answered 
the first of these questions, yes, but the second, no. 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 177 


He held that it was not wise to seek to found single 
national Churches. He advocated instead the de- 
velopment of world denominations which would be 
international, a universal Methodist Church, etc. He 
believed the Church should be a supranational organ- 
isation and he believed also that different types of 
organisation and experience were desirable and that it 
was better to use the great types which had grown up 
in the West rather than to have the Church in each 
nation divided, as he felt sure it would: be, into different 
denominations which would have behind them divisive 
personalities or the remembrance and alienation of 
personal conflicts or disagreement on pettier principles 
than those which had originated the present Christian 
denominations. On the other hand equally earnest men 
have argued for the establishment in each nation of a 
real national Church which would not perpetuate exotic 
divisions or waste energy in duplicate organisations 
but would unite the all too inadequate forces and re- 
sources of Christianity in a common programme and a 
common effort. In accordance with this view many of 
the missionary societies have sought to establish 
Churches in complete independence of the Churches 
of the West and to encourage them to unite with 
other Churches. Already in many fields kindred bod- 
ies, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, have united, 
and in some fields wider comprehensions have come, 
as in the union of the Presbyterian, Reformed and 
Congregational Churches in India. 

The other problem is not less difficult. What shall 
the relation of the foreign mission be to the native 
Church which results from it? The theoretical answer 
is plain—the relation of John the Baptist, the fore- 
runner. The business of the mission is to found the 


178 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Church and then as soon as possible to fade away in it 
or behind it. The difficulties, however, in the way of 
the happy and instant and steady operation of this 
policy are great. Some of them are personal. Old 
missionaries must make way for native leaders. And 
on the other hand because the process is a long one old 
native leaders must make room for young foreign mis- 
sionaries, who also must understand and fit into this 
process of transition. The very chronology of this 
process is one of its great difficulties. There are often 
racial elements involved and sometimes inevitably also 
the political environment contributes other elements of 
trouble. But it can be honestly said that the native 
Churches are no more ready to take over responsibility 
than the mission agencies are to transfer it. More than 
this, the real difficulty is not to get missions to re- 
linquish power. It is to get the Churches to take it, to 
claim their prerogative from above and to assume the 
leadership in the evangelisation of the nation. 

This leadership unquestionably involves a genuine 
naturalisation and nationalisation of the Church in each 
land. But the adjustment of the Church to nationalism 
raises interesting problems in the life and work of the 
Church and of foreign missions. One meets in India, 
especially, to-day, the question, which was so familiar 
in Japan twenty-five years ago, as to the influence of 
the nationalistic spirit upon the ideal of the Church 
both as to organisation and as to doctrine, and many 
articles are written and many speeches are made with 
regard to the contribution which India should make 
in the development of Christian institutions and in the 
interpretation of the Gospel. It is always wholesome to 
have such questions raised, more wholesome perhaps 
even for the home Churches than for the Churches on 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 179 


the mission field. We may be sure that life is an organic 
process and that it all hangs together. The roles of 
East and West would be exchanged to-day, if this were 
not the fact. In politics and economics and social 
progress and, just as truly, in religion, yes even more 
truly in religion, the East has a great deal more to 
learn than it has to teach. The East did teach its best 
to the West nineteen centuries ago when it gave it 
Christianity. It has nothing to give now comparable 
with that gift whose influence is responsible more than 
all else for the difference between the East and the 
West. If the West has not adequately understood 
Christianity or not adequately developed its institu- 
tions, the correction will be made as much by the 
West as by the East. 

I think that the view which Mr. Lowes Dickinson 
sets forth in his little book on the “‘Civilisations of 
India, China, and Japan,” is open to criticism, but I 
fear also that it holds a great deal of truth. “To sum 
up,’ he writes, “I find in India a peculiar civilisation 
antithetical to that of the West. I find a religious con- 
sciousness which negates what is really the religious 
postulate of the West, that life in time is the real and 
important life, and a social institution, caste, which 
negates the implicit assumption of the West that the 
desirable thing is equality of opportunity. I find also 
that in India the contact between East and West 
assumes a form peculiarly acute and irritating owing to 
the fact that India has been conquered, and is governed 
by a Western power, but the contact none the less is 
having the same disintegrating effect it produces on 
other Eastern countries, and I do not doubt that sooner 
or later, whether or no British rule maintains itself, 
the religious consciousness of India will be transformed 


180 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


by the methods and results of positive science, and its 
institutions by the economic influences of industrialism. 
In this transformation something will of course be lost, 
but my own opinion is that India has more to gain and 
less to lose by contact with the West than any other 
Eastern country.” Mr. Dickinson closes his essay with 
the contention that the future civilisation will not be 
the balance or new synthesis of Eastern contemplative- 
ness and Western energy, that the West will not learn 
new lessons from the East while the East holds its 
ancient inheritance and traditions and learns some 
selected lessons from the West. ‘The West may re- 
ceive a stimulus from the East. It can hardly take an 
example. And the East taking from the West its in- 
dustrial organization will have to take everything else. 
I should look, therefore, for a redress of the balance in 
the West, not directly to the importation of ideals from 
the East but to a reaction prompted by its own sense of 
its excesses on the side of activity. And on the other 
hand I expect the East to follow us, whether it likes it 
or not, into all these excesses—and to go right through, 
not around—all that we have been through on its way 
to a higher phase of civilisation. In short, I believe 
that the renewal of art, of contemplation, of religion 
will arise in the West of its own impulse and that the 
East will lose what remains of its achievement in these 
directions and become as ‘materialistic’ (to use the 
word) as the West before it can recover a new and 
genuine spiritual life.” 

The consciousness and the conscience of Asia and 
especially of the Christian Churches in Asia, are right 
in resisting and seeking to falsify this forecast. Noth- 
ing will help them better in this effort than the actual 
facing of facts and the successful resistance of the 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 181 


temptation to gloss facts over under the influence of 
the nationalistic spirit. In India, for example, the 
glorification of a past that never really existed, the 
attempt to read into the past, its institutions and its 
language, ideals that never were there, the composition 
of impossible eclectic programmes, the exaggerated 
imagination of social and intellectual and religious 
contributions which India has to make to Christianity 
and to civilisation, all these things are enemies of the 
truest life and the greatest power in the Indian Church, 
and the leaders of the Church should pray to be de- 
livered from them. This is exceedingly unpopular 
counsel, but is sound counsel none the less. The real 
contributions to human progress and to wider vision 
and larger life have not been made in this self-exalting 
way either by individuals or by races. 

If India, or China can develop simpler forms of 
Christian life, if they can find more effective ways of 
making Christ known to men and enthroning Him in 
their wills and in human society, if fresh methods of 
missionary propaganda can be devised, as it was hoped 
the National Missionary Society of India as an in- 
digenous missionary enterprise might devise them, if 
any lessons can be learned beside the obvious lesson 
from the amazing lack of organisation in Hinduism and 
the desultoriness and yet pervasiveness of its worship 
and activity, if individuals and groups will actually 
develop new methods of Christian achievement and 
pay the costs which such new discoveries ever involve, 
the whole Church throughout the world will be grate- 
ful. But it needs always to be kept in mind in these 
matters that one deed, one steadfast, continuous and 
persistent deed, is worth more than many dreams. 
India’s religious history shows her capacity for these 


182 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


deeds, and many names, ancient and modern, rise to 
one’s mind. It is for the Indian Church to show, as it 
will show, how much more wonderful the achieve- 
ments of Christ in Indian hearts can be. It is for the 
Indian or Chinese Church to show, also, as it will show, | 
that such deeds can be done not in the spirit of separa- 
tism, of race assertion, or of national pride, but after 
the mind of Christ. 

The finest and solidest thing in foreign missions is 
the existence of real native Churches which are abso- 
lutely free, alive with a life and power of their own, 
dependent on no western Church and beholden to no 
man, but at the same time brotherly and trustful in 
their glad relations to the missions and Churches of 
the West. Such Churches are the Church of Christ 
in Japan, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian 
Church in Brazil, the Church of South India and still 
others. These are the crown and demonstration of 
the work of foreign missions. The Church of Christ in 
Japan may be taken for illustration. 

The story of the founding and development of this 
Church is told in Dr. Imbrie’s little book, “The Church 
of Christ in Japan.” It is one of the most remarkable 
Christian Churches which have as yet been developed. 
It has nine presbyteries, with 99 _ self-supporting 
churches. Indeed, it recognises no church organisation 
as having the full status of a church until it is self- 
supporting. In addition to the self-supporting churches 
it has 131 other congregations with 81 additional 
organisations, which are connected with the affiliated 
foreign missions and which will in time pass over 
wholly to the Church of Christ. It has now a member- 
ship of over 38,000. Ten years ago it had 160 pastors 
and 161 evangelists and licentiates, 302 elders and 109 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 183 


deaconesses. Of its 463 trustees then, 58 were women, 
1,480 Sunday School teachers teach the 20,475 Sunday 
School scholars. The total value of the Church’s prop- 
erty ten years ago was, Yen 615,000. Its contributions 
in 1924 were, Yen 505,103. 

Two meetings of the Church which we attended in 
Tokyo some years ago gave us a clear idea of the 
character and influence of the Church of Christ. One 
of these was the meeting of its Women’s Missionary 
Society held in the beautiful home of one of the lead- 
ing doctors of Tokyo, whose wife was president of the 
society. There were present women of many social 
relationships from a viscountess down. It was just 
such a group of strong, capable, Christian women as 
might be met in one of our women’s missionary boards 
at home. They explained to us the work that they were 
doing at home and abroad and sent their greetings to 
the women in America through whom the best thing in 
life had come to them. 

The other gathering was at a luncheon given in 
honour of our deputation and the deputation of the 
Dutch Reformed Board at which there were present 
about sixty men and women of the Church. There 
were three members of Parliament, three generals in 
the army, three eminent lawyers and three of the good 
doctors of the city. There was a daughter of Prince 
Iwakura who led out from Japan the embassy which 
came back with the purposes and ideas which have 
made the new Japan. There was the executive secre- 
tary of the Red Cross Society and there were many of 
the men who stand at the head of the thought and life 
of the Christian forces of the Empire. It filled one 
with gratitude and with confidence to see such a group 
of Christian men and women and to think of the 


184 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Church which they represented. These men under- 
stood the problems with which Christianity has to deal 
in the national life of Japan and in the modern world. 
No inrush of ideas or forces hostile to evangelical truth 
can surprise them. The Church of Christ is a body 
with which we can rejoice to co-operate in the evan- 
gelisation of Japan and the Christianisation of its in- 
fluence in Asia. 

The Church has many grave problems to face both 
within and without, such as the laxity of Sabbath 
observance, the loss of church membership through 
the migratory habits of the Japanese, the provision of 
an adequate number of strong men for the ministry, 
and the unification of their training, the promotion of 
Christian unity where denominational distinctions ap- 
pear to be fixing themselves somewhat after the fashion 
of the sects of Buddhism but without anything like 
their divisiveness and conflict. Outwardly, surely one 
of the most important problems is the strengthening of 
friendly relationships with the Churches in Korea and 
China. If the Christians of these countries cannot 
come together in love and trust what hope is there of 
the establishment of any interrelations of real friend- 
ship? There are many Chinese and Koreans, specially 
students, in Tokyo, but these have been holding aloof 
by themselves. Many of the Koreans are Christians 
and Mr. Uemura used to argue that instead of having 
their separate Korean Church, it would be better for 
them, as also for Japanese in the United States, to 
join existing local churches and mingle themselves 
with the Christian people among whom they are living. 
The Christian girls’ schools in Japan are doing a great 
deal to promote unity of feeling by the way in which 
the Japanese girls in these schools are treating the many 


NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD’ 185 


Korean girls who are studying with them. But the 
Chinese and Korean young men hold apart. New 
measures need to be devised to make Tokyo not a place 
where racial feelings are intensified as at present, but a 
centre of brotherhood. And some way should be 
found also for closer acquaintance and relationship be- 
tween the Church of Christ and the Churches in Korea 
and in northern China. There is a chance here for 
large-minded and constructive Christian service which 
will prove to be a national service in the best sense on 
the part of the Church of Christ. 

The growth of these Christian Churches made up of 
men and women as truly human and as truly Christian 
as the men and women of any other nation is itself an 
answer to the race problem. That is the most acute 
problem of the modern world, rivalled only by the 
problem of economic justice in its two aspects, the duty 
of production and the equity of distribution. It can- 
not be said that even in the missionary enterprise racial 
prejudice and narrowness have been transcended. They 
will break out of human weakness and limitation any- 
where and many missionaries and native leaders alike 
are conscious of objectionable race feeling in others 
who are unaware of it in themselves. Nevertheless, 
the fundamental policy of missions and the true rela- 
tions already existing in part, and coming ever more 
and more fully to exist, between the indigenous 
Churches and the Churches of the West and their mis- 
sionaries embody the only right and possible solution 
of the race problem. All conceivable solutions of the 
race problem reduce themselves to three, race conflict, 
race amalgamation, race co-operation. Many hold 
that the first solution is the only practicable one, race 
struggle resulting in the dominance of the strongest. 


186 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


But that means that there is no solution. No race 1s 
going to accept a place of permanent menialism and it 
is irrational to sutrender to such a barbaric and jungle 
conception of the necessary process of human history. 
Others hold that the one sure and inevitable solution of 
the race problem is universal miscegenation. They 
point out that there is not one pure race in the world, 
that history shows an ever-ceasing intermixture of the 
blood of all races, and that time alone is necessary to 
produce of all races one composite race. Only time can 
show whether they are right, but meanwhile it is open to 
us to seek a different and, we believe, a better solution. 
The principle of it is in our foreign missions enter- 
prise, the principle of race integrity and of differ- 
entiated, co-operating human service. Each human 
race is as capable of experiencing and _ illustrating 
Christianity as the white race. Each race needs it. 
It needs each race to bring out its infinite fulness and 
universal sufficiency. When the heavenly City comes 
down to dwell upon the earth it will embrace all the 
glory and the honour of each nation and race. They 
will differ one from another. But they are all neces- 
sary to the completed glory of the City. It is the 
business of foreign missions to testify to this truth and 
to provide a demonstration of it in the character and 
work of the Christian Churches, East and West, and 
in their relationship of understanding and unity and 
love. 


CHAPTER VI 
Tue Ricu FRUITAGE oF ForeIGN Missions 


THE foreign mission enterprise takes the Gospel 
seriously. It would never have originated otherwise 
nor could it have yielded the unequalled fruitage which 
has come from it. It is the greatest philanthropy in 
the world. It is the deepest political and social reform. 
It has produced great movements of national and racial 
education. It has promoted industrial progress and 
commercial intercourse helpful to all affected by it. It 
has expanded human knowledge. And it has been and 
done all this because its fundamental business has been 
deeper and more radical than all these’ things. It has 
conceived that men and the world need to be saved and 
that Jesus Christ alone can save them. Some years 
ago the New York Sun, at the time of the Ecumenical 
Missionary Conference in New York, commented on 
what it deemed the disappearance of the earlier note of 
foreign missions. It doubted whether the idea of the 
missionary hymn retained its vitality. 


“Salvation, O Salvation. 
The joyful sound proclaim, 
Till earth’s remotest nation 
Has heard Messiah’s name.” 


Perhaps Heber’s hymn is not sung so much as in for- 
mer days. Perhaps when it is sung some phrases are 
slipped over with hesitant accent. Perhaps there are 


those who do not regard themselves and the world as 
187 


188 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


in need of being “saved,” and who regard the mission 
of Christ in our world to-day as a work of teaching and 
leading rather than a work of saving. 

In current missionary apologetics and appeal it may 
be true that the missionary conception of Paul, of 
preaching the Gospel to people that they may be saved, 
is often slighted by being either assumed, rejected, or 
ignored, and that the emphasis is laid on other values of 
missions. It has even been argued that missions should 
be supported because they increase the political prestige 
of the nation from which the missionaries go or afford 
opportunity for the increase of its political power. On 
these grounds France, however she might deal with the 
Roman Catholic Church at home, assumed everywhere 
the role of protector of the Roman Catholic missions 
abroad. And Germany’s seizure of Kiao Chou Bay in 
Shantung, which helped to precipitate the Boxer upris- 
ing, was justified as reparation for the murder of Ger- 
man missionaries. Likewise foreign missions have 
been defended because they promoted trade and even 
because they served to lull into Christian resignation 
subject peoples who might otherwise have made trouble. 
Arguments of this sort and many more like them have 
helped to justify any fear and dislike on the part of the 
non-Christian world. The wonder is not that foreign 
missions have had to encounter unnecessary and unwar- 
ranted difficulties, but that they have been able to live 
down the curse of false support and misrepresentation. 

Even true friends and believers in missions, how- 
ever, are prone to set in the foreground secondary 
services or by-products of missions and to obscure their 
fundamental religious and redemptive character. We 
have spoken of the work of Dr. Nevius in North China 
in introducing fruit culture. He was one of the most 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 189 


single-minded of evangelists but he began in North 
China the cultivation of the best American fruits, 
grapes, apples, peaches, pears, etc., and his name is 
blessed by all sorts of people in the Far East who are 
accustomed to sneer at missionaries as exclusively other- 
worldly and as unwarrantably engaged in imposing 
western ideas on the Chinese. We tell also of the work 
of the University of Nanking, a Christian co-operative 
institution, which is improving silk, cotton and wheat 
culture, and helping agriculture and promoting foresta- 
tion and flood and famine prevention. We tell of the 
schools which are teaching trades in Africa. As Sir 
H. H. Johnston says: 

“Tt is they (the missionaries) who in many cases 
have first taught the natives carpentry, joinery, 
masonry, tailoring, cobbling, engineering, book-keep. 
ing, printing and European cookery; to say nothing of 
reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of gen- 
eral knowledge. Almost invariably, it has been to mis- 
sionaries that the natives of interior Africa have owed 
their first acquaintance with a printing press, the turn- 
ing-lathe, the mangle, the flat-iron, the saw-mill, and 
the brick mould. Industrial teaching is coming more 
and more in favour, and its immediate results in British 
Central Africa have been most encouraging. Instead 
of importing painters, carpenters, store clerks, cooks, 
telegraphists, gardeners, natural history collectors from 
England or India, we are gradually becoming able to 
obtain them amongst the natives of the country, who 
are trained in the missionaries’ schools, and who having 
been given simple, wholesome local education, have 
not had their heads turned, and are not above their 
station in life.” 

And we tell of the services whose benefits we enjoy 


Igo THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


at home. We owe the seedless oranges in America to a 
missionary named Schneider in Brazil. The University 
of Nanking saved the pear industry on the Pacific 
Coast by sending home a root which was immune to 
the American pear disease and on which the shoots of 
our threatened American trees were grafted. Let these 
illustrations out of hundreds which might be cited 
suffice. So rich is the store and so persuasive are they, 
that it is very easy for us in presenting the missionary 
appeal and in thinking of the work of missions to-day 
to let the fundamental thing fall into the background. 

It ought to be in the background. Its place is be- 
hind and beneath everything else. But it ought to be 
in the foreground too and it ought to control and shape 
all our appeals for support and govern and direct all 
our activities and policies and plans. The primary 
business of missions is religious. It is to proclaim the 
Gospel, to make Jesus Christ known as the Saviour 
of the World. And its primary and essential fruitage is 
converted men and women, individual persons who have 
accepted Him as their Lord and Saviour and are trying 
to follow Him. One of the old criticisms of missions 
was that it produced no such persons, but only “rice 
Christians,” clever frauds or poor ignorant folk to 
whom the only religion was daily bread. This sort of 
criticism is not as common as it once was. The Boxer 
uprising ended itin China. It was indeed already ended 
there for all intelligent men. In the last century there 
Was no more competent and severe critic of missions in 
China than Alexander Michie, for long years editor of 
the Tientsin Times, but he derided the idea of “rice 
Christians.” “Few as they may be when all is told,” 
said he, in ‘Missionaries in China,” “and mixed as they 
must be with spurious professors, it is a gratifying 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS IQI 


fact, which cannot be gainsaid, that Christians of the 
truest type—men ready to burn as martyrs, which is 
easy—and who lead ‘helpful and honest’ lives, which 
is as hard as the ascent from Avernus, crown the 
labours of missionaries, and have done so from the 
very beginning. It is thus shown that the Christian 
religion is not essentially unadapted to China, and that 
the Chinese character is susceptible to its regenerating 
power.’ And these true Christians are not few in 
number. Even the martyrs make up a multitude. The 
two of whom Dr. Dennis tells are representative of ten 
thousand: ‘A prominent Christian, with his mother, 
sister, and wife, were bundled into a cart and taken to a 
vacant lot outside of the village, singing meanwhile, 
“He Leadeth Me,’ as they thus journeyed to their death. 
One by one they were slain, each in turn refusing to 
recant. There is a certain realism about the faith of 
some of these Chinese Christians, which is both touch- 
ing and inspiring, as in the case of that member of the 
North Church of Peking—Hsieh by name—who in- 
sisted upon donning his best clothes, as if for a festal 
occasion, when he was led to his martyrdom. ‘I am to 
enter the palace of the King,’ he said, ‘and the best 
clothes I have should be used.’ No wonder the Chinese 
dug out his heart, to see if they could discover the 
secret of his courage.” And as Mr. Michie says, for 
every one who has died as a martyr, there are many 
more who have lived loyal and faithful lives, fulfilling 
in their measure the promise that the Gospel was to 
spread like the sea. 

There are still, however, those who disbelieve. ‘Do 
you really think,” asked an American who had been in 
Japan representing a great locomotive works, “‘that any 
one of these people has ever become a real Christian ?”’ 


Ig2 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


I wish this intelligent but ignorant man could have 
been at the luncheon which I attended some years ago in 
Tokyo of a few men and women of one denomination 
alone, and many of them members of one congregation, 
of which I have already spoken. Let me cite a few in- 
dividuals of other races whom I know. The first of 
these is Kaka. He was a grizzled old Kurd living in 
the city of Hamadan. Every one knew that he had 
been a fierce Mohammedan believer and that he came of 
a long line of Mohammedan ecclesiastics, and every- 
body knows too that now he is a Christian, going to and 
fro in Hamadan and the villages round about and 
openly preaching Christ with no one able to answer him 
or gainsay his word. We asked him one evening for 
his story, and this is what he told us. “Mirza Saeed 
and I were brothers.”’ Mirza Saeed is now one of the 
leading doctors of Teheran, and I shall tell his story 
later. “For seven generations,’ Kaka continued, “our 
fathers had been mollahs. Our neighbours were Chris- 
tians. Being Sunnis, we sometimes ate with them, but 
we never talked on the subject of religion. Forty- 
four years ago a Nestorian evangelist named Kasha 
Yohanan was sent from Urumia to the region of Kur- 
distan in search of a teacher of Kurdish, and he came 
to our city of Senneh. An Armenian Christian pointed 
out Mirza Saeed to him as such a teacher as he was 
seeking. Saeed was only a boy then, but very capable. 
He came to me as his older brother, as our father had 
died, to ask permission to give Kurdish lessons to 
Yohanan. I consented. For six months my brother 
taught Yohanan, and then one day he told me that some 
Jews were coming to Yohanan to discuss Scriptures. 
I said that this was nothing at all for us to consider, 
but I did not know that Yohanan had given Saeed the 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS I193 


Bible and other books to read and that he stored these 
in his mind. Before long he began to absent himself 
from Moslem prayers. One day a blind mollah came 
to me for help. He knew the Koran by heart and was 
memorising a book on the birth and life of Mohammed. 
I was greatly pleased to help him. One day as the blind 
mollah was reciting this book, Saeed, who was listening, 
said that if these things were true, the Prophet should 
have foretold them. I reached for my rifle to shoot 
Saeed for reviling the Prophet, but the blind mollah 
seized the rifle. I certainly meant to kill Saeed, for I 
was one of those who are devoted to the Prophet, even 
the Prophet who came with a sword. The blind 
mollah took Saeed away and warned him to be more 
careful, bidding him to reflect what, if his own brother 
had tried to shoot him, another might have done. I 
soon noticed that Saeed was sad and troubled, and I 
asked him to tell me as his brother the cause of his 
sorrow, but he would say nothing. I asked him again 
one night later, and he said he would write it out for 
me, but when he had written the paper he hesitated to 
give it to me. A week later at midnight he brought 
it, saying “Whatever you intend to do, do. It is two 
years now since I have left Islam and accepted Chris- 
tianity on the basis of what I have read in the Koran 
and the Bible.’ It was winter-time and snowing, but I 
said to him, ‘Saeed, there is nothing I can do but turn 
you out as an apostate.’ So I opened the door and he 
went out into the night. I think he sat in a shop win- 
dow until morning, and the rest of the night I spent 
crying to God, ‘You have taken away my father and 
my mother and now my brother is taken from my 
hand.’ 

“In the morning Saeed went to the Imam Jum’eh 


I94 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


and said, ‘I have been reading such and such things in 
the Koran and the Bible. What do you say?’ Later 
I learned that thirty men had bound themselves to- 
gether to kill Saeed, so I too went to the Imam Jum’eh 
and asked him what to do. ‘Do nothing,’ said he, ‘but 
leave the matter to me.’ On Friday, accordingly, the 
Imam Jum’eh spoke openly in the mosque to all the 
people, saying, ‘Mohammed Saeed is my child. Leave 
him to me. I will bring him back with proofs from 
the Koran.’ But Saeed was lost to Islam forever, and 
because I relented and protected him, conditions be- 
came so bad that some of the Moslems of Senneh 
planned to kill me as well as Saeed. One day I found 
a letter at the post for Saeed, which I read, from Mr. 
Hawkes, bidding him to come to Hamadan. And I 
got a horse for him and sent him off by night. 

“When I got back, the neighbours gathered and 
wept over Saeed, and I thought of what he had written 
in his statement and of all that he had told me. Not 
long after I went to the mosque and heard a man read 
from Sirat el Navi, a book on the private life of the 
Prophet and his relations with his wives, I bought 
this book, and as I read it, I wondered how such things 
could be true of a Prophet. A little later I went to the 
Catholic Church in Senneh and talked with a Chaldean 
priest there and tried to get a Bible to read, but was 
unable to do so. While I was still endeavouring to 
get a copy, I one day saw a man named Ossitur of 
Hamadan coming through the bazar with a bundle 
under hisarm. I asked who he was, and upon learning, 
introduced myself as Saeed’s brother and got a Bible. 
As I read it, I came to the passage, ‘I will raise up a 
prophet like unto his brethren.’ I thought surely this 
meant Mohammed, and I decided to come to Hamadan 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS I95 


and take Saeed off to Bagdad or to some other place 
where strong influences could be brought to bear upon 
him to win him back to Islam. So I sold my home 
and told the people I was going to get Saeed and to 
take him where he would be turned from his errors. 
Some of the people doubted my purpose and sought to 
detain me by offering me the place of leader of the 
prayers in the mosque, but at last I went, though I was 
not sure of myself. My heart had become two. 

“On reaching Hamadan, I found that Saeed was a 
pupil of Dr. Alexander, the medical missionary there, 
who welcomed me and gave me some books to read, 
among them ‘The Balance of Truth.’ As I read this 
book, I found in it the indictment of sin and the mes- 
sage of Christ’s love, and these began to have an effect 
on me. Each day I went to the big mosque, but I 
found nothing in the preaching. It was all about what 
Hassan had suffered. And as I saw more clearly 
what Islam and its preachers were, Christ’s words about 
the Pharisees came home to me—the upper seats, the 
wide borders. But what impressed me most was the 
contrast between Mohammedans and the missionaries 
and Christian preachers whom I had come to know 
and between their lives. I began to go to prayers at 
Dr. Alexander’s home and then sometimes, with great 
fear, to church. So things continued until twenty-four 
years ago, when Mr. Watson was going home to 
America and asked me to go on the journey with him 
to the border of Persia. I went, and on the journey 
was thrown from my horse and broke my knee-cap 
and was brought to the home of Dr. Holmes in Hama- 
dan. I had nothing to do but to read, and I read the 
Bible and found Christ. 

“As I was getting well, Hajji Mirza Hassein and 


196 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


the chief preacher to the Shah were speaking here in 
Hamadan. I went to hear and got into a debate with 
them. They came for a renewal of the debate to the 
mission residence at the dispensary, and I saw that the 
truth was with Christianity. Saeed was there, and 
they could not answer his words. ‘Be silent,’ they said 
to him, ‘and let the Sahib do the talking.’ After the 
debate I called on these men, and they gave me a 
Moslem book to read, but it proved nothing, and I held 
to Christ. | 

“At first I was afraid to speak openly of my new 
faith, but now I am not afraid of anybody. For some 
years I had charge of the boys in the boarding school, 
but now for twelve years I have gone to and fro in the 
evangelistic work preaching the Gospel of our Saviour. 
The people do not resent my message. ‘If you are in 
doubt,’ I say to them, ‘the Koran itself says, Ask the 
people of the Book. Who are the people of the Book 
and what is the Book? I have the Book here. Let us 
ask it now.’ ” 

The old man, lame from the effects of his fall and 
grizzled like a veteran of many wars, whimsical, loving, 
and unafraid, with a living experience of Christ and 
an authoritative knowledge of Islam, is one of the most 
faithful and untiring preachers of Christ in Persia, and 
his children are following in his steps. 

Some weeks later than our talk with Kaka we spent 
an evening with his brother, Dr. Mirza Saeed Khan in 
Teheran. Dr. Saeed Kahn is one of the best known 
and most influential Christians in Persia. After study- 
ing in Hamadan he took a medical course in London 
and is one of the most trusted Persian physicians. One 
of his patients is the last governor of Kurdistan whose 
predecessor a few years ago would no doubt have felt 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 197 


it to be his duty to respond to the demand of the mol- 
lahs in Senneh for Dr. Saeed’s execution for apostasy. 
He is a great student both of Christianity and Moham- 
medanism, with a keen eye for old Persian books of 
which he has sent a number to Prof. E. G. Browne, and 
he gave me for Mrs. Speer, with whom he and Mrs. 
Saeed formed a great friendship when we were in 
Hamadan in 1896 and 1897, one of the most beautiful 
copies of the Koran I have ever seen. It is a small 
book about two and a half by three and a half inches, 
exquisitely done by hand, with marginal decorations by 
some loving Mohammedan scholar, on parchment 
sheets with a lacquered binding with soft ornamental 
flowering. He told his story in choice English. It 
was just as Kaka had narrated it to us but with many 
added touches. After his father’s death as a boy of 
sixteen he had been given by the old mollahs a turban 
to wear and a school to teach. He was curious to learn 
other languages, and on that account, was willing to 
exchange his knowledge of Kurdish for Kasha Yoha- 
nan’s knowledge of Syriac. At first he had thought 
that all the Old Testament prophecies regarding the 
Messiah referred to Mohammed, and he used to rejoice 
in them and repeat them to Kaka. But when he came, 
in Isaiah, to the great chapter about the Servant who 
should not strive to cry nor be harsh or violent, he was 
halted. That certainly could not apply to Mohammed. 
When he himself had become convinced of the truth of 
Christianity and Kaka had become interested, one of 
their chief difficulties related to their father. He had 
been a good and earnest and honest man. Once he had 
found a bag of money and, though in great need, had 
kept it intact until its owner was discovered. How 
could so good a man, Kaka asked, be lost for not ac- 


198 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


cepting Christ? Saeed’s reply had been that he and 
Kaka would be judged according to the light that had 
been given them, and that that light had never reached 
their father. It was after seven years of Christian 
teaching that Saeed had at last been baptised by Mr. 
Hawkes. Not long afterwards some European teachers 
of perfectionism had come to Hamadan, and, taken by 
their teaching, Saeed had gone to Sweden, but the 
second verse of the third chapter of the first Epistle of 
John corrected for him any thought of a present sin- 
lessness, and he went on to England to find many 
friends there and to prepare for his life work in Persia. 
More than once since his conversion has he returned 
to Senneh, at first with peril but at last with great 
honour. Once in his early years in Teheran the Senneh 
ecclesiastics sent a formidable communication to the 
Turkish legation demanding his death as an apostate, 
but it was intercepted by friendly hands and destroyed. 
And no one now would think of lifting a hostile hand 
against the familiar and honoured figure of this sincere 
and mature Christian who walks to and fro wherever he 
will in Persia, by life and by word bearing witness to 
the True Prophet and only Saviour, our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

The deepest and most powerful influence of foreign 
missions is represented in the lives of individuals like 
these. They and others like them are to mean to their 
nations just what Paul and the little groups of early 
Christian believers meant to the Roman Empire and 
to the Christian Church. And yet the power in these 
lives is the power not of these lives but of the truth that 
has begun to take hold of human life, however im- 
perfectly, through them, the truth of the Christian 
thought of God, of the revelation of God in Christ. 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 199 


In one of the ablest and most refreshing missionary 
books of the last generation, “A Short Study of Chris- 
tian Missions,’ a book which should be freshly cir- 
culated in the present generation, the late Professor 
William Newton Clarke set forth the significance of 
this fruitage of foreign missions. Dr. Clarke was 
accounted a thorough-going modernist in his day and 
would be still so regarded, but he never for one moment 
conceived of Christianity as a confession of ignorance 
of the truth about God, and of missions as a co-opera- 
tion of Christians with people of all other religions in a 
search for an undiscovered Gospel. The New Testa- 
ment thought of God, he held, was final and the great 
aim and the supreme power of missions lay in giving 
that Christian thought of God to the whole world: 
“What then,’ asks Dr. Clarke, “is that excellence in 
Christianity by virtue of which it is entitled to be a 
missionary religion, and deserves to be received by 
all men? The answer is, Christianity is entitled to be 
a missionary religion and to displace all other religions, 
because of its God. 

“There are many glories in the religion of Jesus 
Christ, and it can do many services for men; and, what 
is more, it proclaims and brings to pass such an experi- 
ence of God as humanity has never elsewhere known. 
It is in this that we find that superiority which entitles 
Christianity to offer itself to all mankind. 

“Tt is necessary to tell in few words what this God 
is Who is the glory of Christianity and the ground of 
its boldness in missionary advances—this God so in- 
finitely excellent that all men may well afford to forget 
all their own religion, if they may but know Him. 
The God of Christianity is one, the sole source, Lord 
and end of all. He is holy, having in Himself the 


200 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


character that is the worthy standard of all beings. He 
is love, reaching out to save the world from sin and 
fill it with His own goodness. He is wise, knowing 
how to accomplish his heart’s desire. He is Father in 
heart, looking upon His creatures as His own, and 
seeking their welfare. All this truth concerning Him- 
self He has made known in Jesus Christ the Saviour 
of the world, in Whom His redemptive will has found 
expression, and His saving love has come forth to 
mankind. 

“That the glory of Christianity is its God may most 
conveniently be shown by bringing this excellence into 
comparison with other excellences on the strength of 
which Christianity is often commended. Various ex- 
cellences have been placed at the front as justifying 
the missionary endeavour and the offering of our 
religion to the world; but when they are compared with 
this excellence, it will be found that they take their 
place as specifications under it, or as forms in which 
this supreme glory manifests itself. 

“Christianity is often offered as worthy to be uni- 
versal because it is ethically noble. It is entitled to 
supplant other religions because it surpasses them all in 
its conception of human duty, and in its power to secure 
the realisation of its ideals. It introduces solid and 
efficient ethical principles, and it produces high charac- 
ter, in a manner known to no other religion. 

“This statement is entirely true, but it is incomplete. 
It is weakness to declare the ethical greatness of our 
religion without telling what eternal reality it rests 
upon. Why is Christianity ethically noble and power- 
ful? Christianity has an ethical God. It knows a God 
with a character, and that the best possible character 
of God has been shown to us men, and lived out in our 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 20I 


presence in the character of His Son, Jesus Christ. It 
declares that the character of God is the standard for 
men, and that the good God has drawn near in self- 
revelation, on purpose to help men reach this standard. 
In its God, Christianity has the substance of the 
noblest ethics and the sure hope of attainment to high 
character ; for its God is the real and living God, Whose 
character is a reality, and Whose love for goodness is 
the most powerful ethical fact in existence. Thus the 
claim that Christianity may offer itself as universal 
because of its ethical nobleness is only a form of the 
broad claim that Christianity may offer itself as uni- 
versal because of its God.” 

The conception of God known in Christ is the most 
revolutionary and transforming of all conceptions. It 
changes the whole world for the animistic peoples. As 
Dr. Warneck points out in “The Living Christ and 
Dying Heathenism,” ““The Gospel brings to the heathen 
the living God; the story of salvation reveals Him to 
them as a God of saving deeds. Along with and com- 
plementary to this revelation they receive a second gift, 
a mighty experience; they are set free from their old 
slavery. The knowledge of God which comes to them 
from His revealed acts delivers them from bondage. 
The insurmountable wall that rises up between the 
heathen and God is not sin, as among ourselves (not 
in the first place at any rate); it is the kingdom of 
darkness in which they are bound. That bondage is 
shown in the fears that surround them, fear of souls, 
fear of spirits, fear of human enemies and magicians; 
in an ignominious dependence upon fate. The Gospel 
comes to unloose the ignoble bonds. It stands forth 
before their eyes a delivering power, a redemption.” 

But the Christian thought of God cuts as deep, if 


202 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


not deeper, into the conception of the more advanced 
religions, into Hindu pantheism and Mohammedan 
fatalism and the sheer contradictions of Buddhism both 
of the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle, and into Con- 
fucian secularism and Taoist geomancy. ‘The spread 
of Christianity has altered the idea of God in almost 
every nation of the world. Many peoples who have not 
yet become Christian have had their conception of God 
radically changed in the direction of the Christian idea. 
As a Japanese writes: “Christianity has to a very 
marked degree transformed our conception of Kami. 
Formerly we thought of many Kami who were the 
deified forces of nature, the spirits of heroes, or the 
patron deities of different localities. Although the 
philosophy we had received from China spoke of “The 
Heavenly Sovereign,’ or ‘Celestial and Terrestrial 
Kami,’ these terms were very indefinite in their mean- 
ing. Christianity, on the other hand, has told us of a 
Kami who is the Supreme Personality, the Ruler of 
the universe. The thought contained in the English 
word ‘God’ has wrought a great change in Japanese 
literature, and also in our spoken language, so that 
most persons now think of Kami as the Lord and 
Ruler of heaven and earth. When Japanese now hear 
of such expressions as ‘the unseen Kami,’ or ‘the Kami 
of heaven and earth,’ instead of thinking of the Kami 
they once did, they spontaneously connect the word with 
the conception of Kami as taught by Christianity.” 
The missionary issue is not the correction of the 
Christian conception of God by the addition to it of 
truth which other conceptions are to contribute. It is 
such a proclamation of Christ to the world as will lead 
all men to come away from their partial thoughts to 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 203 


Him; applying to their systems words which we long 
ago learned to apply to all of ours. 


“Our little systems have their day, 
They have their day atid cease to be. 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.” 


We could find in St. Paul the warrant for sterner 
words, but warrant also for these. And both warrants 
are also in the words of the Lord. 

We are concerned here, however, chiefly with the 
thought of the fruitfulness in human life of the Chris- 
tian conception of God. And of this fruitfulness 
Christian missions throughout the centuries are the in- 
disputable evidence. The facts are set forth unanswer- 
ably as regards early and medieval Christian missions 
in Europe in Uhlhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with 
Heathenism,” Storrs’ “Divine Origin of Christianity 
Attested by its Historical Results” and Brace’s “Gesta 
Christi.” For modern missions they are presented with 
convincing thoroughness in the Ely Volume published 
in 1881 and bearing the full title “The Ely Volume or 
the Contributions of our Foreign Missions to Science 
and Human Well-being,” and by Dr. Dennis in “Chris- 
tian Missions and Social Progress.’’ In his three great 
volumes of testimony, thoroughly documented, Dr. 
Dennis shows what the thought and the love of God as 
conceived in Christ have done when communicated to 
the world not by word only but by the utterance of that 
word in the lives of men and women in whom human 
need sees and feels the love of God going out visibly 
and tangibly toward it. As the expression of Christ’s 
thought of God and of God’s will for human life, mis- 


204. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


sions, as Dr. Dennis shows, have promoted temperance, 
opposed the liquor and opium traffics which are fatal 
to mutually useful trade, established higher standards 
of personal purity, cultivated industry and frugality, 
elevated women, restrained anti-social customs such as 
polygamy, concubinage and adultery and child marriage 
and infanticide, fostered the suppression of the slave 
trade, abolished cannibalism and human sacrifice and 
cruelty, organised famine relief, improved husbandry 
and agriculture, introduced modern medicine and medi- 
cal science, founded leper asylums and colonies, pro- 
moted cleanliness and sanitation and checked war. 
This is the testimony of the men who know, men like 
the Hon. Sir Arthur Lawley, G.C.LE., K.C.M.G., for- 
merly Governor of Madras: “I have worked for some 
eight years in South Africa, for nearly six years in 
India, and I have travelled leisurely through parts of 
Central Africa, East Africa and Uganda, so that I 
have enjoyed peculiar opportunities of observing and 
gauging the effect of various forms of religious en- 
deavour upon those matters of human well-being which 
are the special concern of any administrator; I mean, 
for example, such things as security and peace, justice 
and liberty, and social progress. With that experience 
gained, I am proud and glad to have this opportunity 
of saying that I declare that, whether in Asia or in 
Africa, missionary influence among the coloured races 
of those continents is wholly for good. There is not 
one community, whether in Asia or in Africa, that has 
embraced Christianity but has risen with a bound from 
its former degraded position, and entered into a new 
and a nobler and a more lasting life.” (“The Record,” 
May 8, 1914.) 

Two recent visitors to China, both wholly uncon- 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 205 


nected with foreign missions, have borne such em- 
phatic testimony to the fruitage of the enterprise that 
their witness has been challenged as extreme. One of 
these is Mr. Henry B. Thompson of Princeton. “What 
good has the West ever brought to China?” he asks, and 
answers: “I would like to say that I believe that most 
of the good that has been done in China has been done 
by missionaries.” The other is Mr. Frederick W. 
Stevens of the University of Michigan Law School, 
who has been for several years in Peking as the rep- 
resentative of the American interests in the Interna- 
tional Bankers’ Consortium which has sought to secure 
co-operation and equity in foreign loans to China. “T 
have come to believe,” says Mr. Stevens, an extremely 
careful and just man, “that America’s greatest con- 
tribution to China, greater even than America’s politi- 
cal friendship, is the work of the American Christian 
missionaries in China. This statement may indicate the 
importance I attach to the need of moral regeneration 
which must precede any great political and industrial 
improvement. In all China there is not a single organ- 
isation, on a scale of importance, that aims at moral 
improvement, or that is calculated to bring it about, 
that is not traceable in its origin to the Christian mis- 
sions. I have inquired among all kinds of people from 
all parts of China for such an activity of non-Christian 
origin, and without finding one.” These testimonies 
have been questioned as excessive. But time will re- 
veal whether they are not a sound estimate of the place 
of foreign missions as a force of progress in human 
history. At any rate, they are in accord with the judg- 
ment of the great geographer, Meinicke: “It is scarcely 
possible to deny the extraordinary importance of the 
missionary efforts of our time; they are yet really in 


206 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


their infancy; yet it is certain that they will wholly 
transform the nature and the relations of the un-Chris- 
tian peoples and will thereby produce one of the most 
magnificent and most colossal revolutions that human 
history contains.” 

Foreign missions have always been charged with a 
distinctly destructive function. We have seen the di- 
rect and uncompromising way in which the early and 
medizeval missionaries assailed and sought to over- 
throw all that they regarded as evil. Sometimes, as in 
the case of slavery in the early Church, the issue was 
committed to time and the sure operation of the prin- 
ciples which Christianity released. At other times, as 
when Boniface hewed down the sacred oak at Geismar, 
missions struck with a bold and immediate blow. It 
may be that at times missionaries have destroyed what 
was innocent or might have been preserved and used, 
but in the main it may be maintained that they have 
been a great protecting and conserving power and that 
they have had to contend in their effort against the 
deadly destruction of political, economic, intellectual or 
moral forces from the West as well as against in- 
digenous influences of disintegration. 

Christian missionaries have been the great conserv- 
ators of the languages and literatures and history of 
the non-Christian peoples. Sir William Hunter said of 
Carey and his associates: “They created a prose ver- 
nacular literature for Bengal; they established the mod- 
ern method of popular education. They gave the first 
great impulse to the native press; they set up the first 
steam engine in India; with its help they introduced 
the manufacture of paper on a large scale; in ten years 
they translated or printed the Bible or parts thereof in 

thirty-one languages.” “Religion, commerce and sci- 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 207 


entific zeal,” said Professor William O. Whitney, “rival 
one another in bringing new regions and peoples to 
light and in uncovering the long-buried remains of 
others lost or destroyed; and of the three the first is 
the most prevailing and effective.” Of many languages 
missionaries made the first dictionaries, Morrison of 
Chinese, Hepburn of Japanese, Gale of Korean. 

And Christian missions are seeking to save the best 
of the past of all peoples. Christianity is salvation in 
this as in other ways. With loyalty to truth it is seek- 
ing to test all things, to destroy all that is evil and to 
hold fast all that is good. In this effort it has to con- 
tend against betrayal from the rear as well as against 
natural opposition in front. Bertrand Russell’s “The 
Problem of China” is a good illustration. 

This book is an unconscious warning to every man 
to guard against colour blindness. Professor Russell 
is so honestly and so unconsciously wrong on so many 
things that every other man, however sure of his hon- 
esty, is forced to ask himself: “Can it be that I too 
without ever being aware of it, but thinking on the 
other hand that I am absolutely right, can be mistaken 
and as ignorant of it as Professor Russell is?” Never 
did a book reveal more clearly the humanness of the 
philosopher and his liability to all the mistakes of ob- 
servation and conclusion to which mere common men 
are exposed. | 

In its warm sympathy with the Chinese people and its 
admiration for the worthy qualities of their history and 
national character, “The Problem of China” is worthy 
of high praise. It tries to view the issues which are dis- 
cussed with full respect for the Chinese position and 
without any foreclosed Western bias. Indeed, its error 
is just the opposite of the ordinary books by Western 


208 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


authors. Professor Russell is more ready to do justice 
to China than to Great Britain. The bias is all pro- 
Chinese and anti-Western. Under the influence of this 
bias he idealises Chinese civilisation and would exclude 
if he could many of the forces of change which China 
herself is introducing and encouraging. He detests 
Western civilisation, “the fierce and cruel system” 
which is miscalled civilisation. China does not need 
anything from the West. “We have forced trade upon 
them solely for our benefit, giving them in exchange 
only things which they would do better without.” The 
inhabitants of China, Mr. Russell thinks, “at the pres- 
ent moment are happier on the average than the inhab- 
itants of Europe, taken as a whole.” And again, “I 
am inclined to think that Chinese life brings more hap- 
piness to the Chinese than English life does to us.” 
“The Chinese are gentle, liberal, seeking only justice 
and freedom. They have a civilisation superior to 
ours in all that makes for happiness.” 

But when he comes to Japan, Professor Russell 
thinks that what that country needs is not the retention 
of its old civilisation but more of the West. “If 
Japan is to emerge successfully, a much more intense 
westernising must take place, involving not only mech- 
anical processes and knowledge of bare facts, but ideals 
and religious and general outlook on life.” Russell 
seems to think the Japanese more different from the 
Chinese than either race is from the western races. “It 
never occurs to a Japanese, even in his wildest dreams, 
to think of a Chinaman as an equal, and although he 
wants the white man to regard him as an equal, he 
himself regards Japan as incalculably superior to any 
white country. His real desire is to be above the 
whites, not merely equal with them.” So the philoso- 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 209 


phers can generalise as wildly as ordinary men from 
facts which they have not tested. 

Professor Russell is opposed to some of the elements 
in Chinese life which in the past have been regarded as 
among its chief elements of strength. He thinks that 
“filial piety and the strength of the family generally 
are perhaps the weakest point in Confucian ethics, the 
only point where the system departs seriously from 
common sense.” And he welcomes “the inevitable fight 
against the family.” Professor Russell has not been 
very strong on family stability, and this may colour 
his view of China. He dislikes also the old economic 
principles of Chinese society as well as those of the 
West, and argues for national and international social- 
ism as the only way of securing peace and freedom. 
“Only international socialism can secure both; and ow- 
ing to the stimulation of revolt by capitalist oppression, 
even peace alone can never be secure until international 
socialism is established throughout the world.” This 
would seem to be strong faith, such as becomes a philos- 
opher, in doctrine, but Mr. Russell will not allow other 
people to view their doctrine as he regards his. Chris- 
tianity, which he seems to regard as synonomous with 
the Y.M.C.A., “involves a contempt for the rest of 
mankind except as potential converts and the belief that 
progress consists in the spread of a doctrine.” But 
perhaps the doctrine of international socialism is differ- 
ent. Certainly Mr. Russell has no sympathy with the 
spread of Christian doctrine nor with the morality of 
Christian peoples. 

One of his chief encouragements in China is in the 
socialistic and liberalistic movement of thought among 
students, especially as it breaks up the old family ideals, 
and leaves behind the traditions of Chinese life. One 


210 . THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


of his grounds of complaint against the mission col- 
leges is that they are too tender toward China’s past 
and do not produce as radical or socialistic a type of 
student as the government schools. ‘This is a reversal 
of the old criticism. It used to be said that mission- 
aries destroyed the old traditions of the non-Christian 
peoples. Mr. Russell complains because they are not 
sufficiently destructive. It is a complaint which is a 
tribute. Christian missions ought to seek to conserve 
and transmit all that is good in the national, racial or 
religious traditions, 

And Christian missions have conceived salvation to 
include human bodies, They are, as has been already 
deliberately said, the greatest philanthropy in the world. 
They are now 1,157 medical foreign missionaries with 
858 hospitals and 1,686 dispensaries which treated in 
1924, 4,788,258 patients. A great many of the con- 
temporary proposals to reconstruct the foreign mission 
enterprise are very mute regarding medical missions. 
They would find it hard to sustain the view that it is 
presumptuous for us to offer medical science to the na- 
tions, as though we had something to give anybody; 
that our medicine ought to go out to learn, not to share; 
that the day has now come to transfer our hospitals to 
native doctors—as please God, let it come as soon as it 
can; that we ought not to be so impudent as to offer 
medical aid to Asia and Africa because there is sickness 
also at home; that each nation must develop its own 
medical science and that truth is only relative; that we 
must have done with the old slanderous practice of 
foreign missions of describing human evil and appeal- 
ing for missionary service on the basis of human suf- 
fering and sin. How curious such views sound to men 
and women who are actually dealing with conditions 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 2II 


such as Dr. Lichtwardt, a medical missionary in far 
Eastern Persia, describes in this personal letter : 


“Tt is generally known that the infant mortality in 
Persia is very large, and, in order to find out approxi- 
mately how great it is, we secured statistics from 200 
women of various ages and classes; villagers and city 
women, women who came for medical treatment, and 
women who were not ill, but merely accompanied some 
patient to the hospital. This we thought would give 
us fairly representative statistics even though the series 
is not very large. These 200 women have 325 living 
children, 619 of their children have died under the age 
of five, and they have had 189 miscarriages. This in- 
dicates an infant mortality (of children under five years 
of age) of 63.6 per cent., if the miscarriages are not 
included in the figures. If the miscarriages are in- 
cluded, the infant mortality is 71.3 per cent. 

“These are very conservative figures, because if 
proper statistics were available it would be seen that of 
these 325 living children, of those under five years of 
age now, a certain percentage will die before they reach 
the age of five. It would probably not be an exaggera- 
tion to say that out of every four babies born in Persia, 
three die before they reach the age of five years. These 
figures for a so-called ‘civilised’ country are appalling, 
and are nearly as bad as conditions in ‘savage’ tropical 
Africa, of which Dr. J. Howard Cook writes: ‘In 
Uganda, 75 per cent. of pregnancies end in abortion or 
miscarriage, premature labour, or still births, or else 
the infants die within the first week of life. (‘Medical 
Practice in Africa and the East,’ p. 44.) The condi- 
tion here in Persia is much worse than in Egypt or 
India, both of which are situated in a more tropical 
climate. In ‘War Against Tropical Disease,’ p. 146, 
Balfour writes: “The infant mortality of Egypt is ap- 
palling, one-third of the children born dying in in- 
fancy.’ Dr. Neve states that the infant mortality in 
Kashmir is nearly 50 per cent. (‘Mercy and Truth,’ 
Aug., 1921, p. 147.) When we compare these statistics 


212 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


with those from America or England, where only one 
out of twelve children dies in infancy, the backward 
condition of Persia and other non-Christian lands can 
be seen. Ashby (‘Infant Mortality,’ p. 23) states that 
in England, up to twelve years of age, there is a mor- 
tality of 8 per cent. All these figures are but an addi- 
tional argument for increased medical work in this land 
of Persia, for the greater proportion of these chil- 
dren could be saved with proper pre-natal obstetric and 
pediatric care. It is especially emphatic of the need of 
women doctors and graduate nurses.” 


Because Christian missions have set a new valuation 
on human life and have devoted the best character and 
capacity we possess to fighting sickness and disease and 
salvaging life they have been one of the greatest pro- 
tective and preservative influences operating in the 
world. They have done the work with very inadequate 
resources as to equipment and support because they 
have commanded the best personal ability and devotion. 
“The work that these men have done,” said Dr. Wil- 
liam H. Welch of Johns Hopkins University, of the 
medical missionaries in China, “is beyond all praise. 
I would like to pay the highest tribute to those men 
who felt the impulse to treat men’s bodies as well as 
their souls. Considering the insufficient staffs and 
meagre equipment, it is wonderful what they have done. 
Much of the work has developed around strong per- 
sonalities. You cannot help being stirred and inspired 
by some of them. It is an education in itself to come 
under the influence of such men.” 

Christian missions have been the fertile source of 
new and recreative ideas, ideas of universal utility, 
neither Eastern nor Western but human. It is often 
alleged against the enterprise that it is seeking to foist 
a Western religion upon the peoples of the East, that 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 213 


the Christian message which missionaries carry is a 
hopelessly occidentalised message. Well, it is true that 
the missionaries have been until now Western. Even 
the Nestorian missionaries who went to China in the 
sixth century were Western. And if Thomas, the 
Apostle, went to India, as he is declared by tradition to 
have done, he certainly was a missionary from the West 
with a message, so far as India was concerned, most 
distinctly Western. We are of the West and we can- 
not go to the East except from the West. And yet all 
this is a matter of words. As a matter of fact mis- 
sionaries come to China and Japan to-day not from the 
West but from the East, and the message which all 
missionaries bear to Asia they got from Asia. The 
sacred books they carry were all written by Asiatics, 
and the great Christian ideas belong to and fit the life 
of Asia as well as they belong to us and fit our life. It 
is because they are universal, and universal because 
true, that the Christian conceptions lay hold of the non- 
Christian peoples and remould their life. 

Fundamental among these ideas is the sense of in- 
dividual worth and freedom. ‘“‘You cannot realise,” 
said a Japanese to a Western friend, “how the Chris- 
tian ideas in the English language and the spirit of 
American life have revolutionised the world for me. I 
never used to think or say ‘T and ‘you,’ but I do now. 
The sense of personal individuality has been an eman- 
cipation to me. Furthermore, I never understood what 
liberty was before. In Japan I felt like a person in a 
box, watched on every side and bound under regula- 
tions. In America all I needed to do was to do right 
and neither government nor police nor law seemed to 
exist for me. It was experiencing the law of liberty.” 
Dr. Willoughby speaks of the absence among the 


214 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


Bantu African people of any sense of individual equal- 
ity and freedom and personal worth: “Birth fixes for 
life (if not for ever) the social status of each individ- 
ual. Where Bantu society is much disintegrated, it is 
possible for a slave to usurp the position of chief by 
intrigue or military adventure; but this is an anomaly, 
and we are discussing regular Bantu life. It has al- 
ways been possible for an individual to break away 
from his family; but if he does, he goes forth stripped 
of his possessions, and is regarded as what our fore- 
fathers used to call ‘a masterless man.’ The choice be- 
fore such a man is, either to remain an outlaw, or to 
put himself under another master, which, with rare ex- 
ceptions, means lower status. What I mean by status 
is that a man’s rights and duties are born with him, 
being conditioned by his precedence in the family and 
the precedence of his family in the tribe. Nothing is 
farther from Bantu thought than the doctrine that all 
men are endowed by nature with fundamental equality 
and an inalienable right to liberty (whatever the defini- 
tion of the term). That doctrine is arch heresy to the 
Bantu and subversive of good morals. They cannot 
admit for a moment that any man but a chief is born 
free, and they cannot conceive how any two men can 
be born equal. Everything in their political system is 
built on status; and status is a matter of birth. Well, 
all this means, in brief, that the individual does not 
exist in Bantu society.” And Mr. Natarajan in an ad- 
dress to the missionaries in Bombay, on July 9, 1923, 
bore his testimony to the way men like himself in India 
had been affected in their governing thoughts by Chris- 
tian Missions. “It is, of course, unnecessary for me to 
tell you that I am not a professing Christian, though I 
cannot sufficiently acknowledge my spiritual debt to the 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 215 


life and teaching of Jesus. To a Hindu, like myself, 
the great defect of Protestant Christianity is the ab- 
sence of a metaphysical background to it. Hinduism 
has this in ample measure, but the picture does not 
stand in sufficient relief. Hinduism is the great blue 
sky in which the sun, the moon, the stars, the comets 
and the clouds have each their proper place and time. 
Many good Hindus have painted the figure of Christ 
prominently upon this background, and they find that it 
suits it quite well. . . . Nobody knows more than I do 
that the direct work of conversion represents a very 
small fraction of the work of Christian Missions. 
Your educational, medical and other philanthropic 
work, and, above all, the example of the devoted lives 
of men and women among you, often in isolated places, 
have influenced a very much larger circle than that 
represented by the small Protestant Indian community. 
Personally, I think that this is the most abiding result 
of Christian Missions in India. . . . Many of the most 
prominent Hindu leaders, like the late Sir Narayan 
Chandavarkar and Mahatma Gandhi, have openly ac- 
knowledged their obligation to Christian teaching. I 
asked Mr. C. R. Dass the other day whether his reli- 
gious ideas were not greatly influenced by the Bible. 
He said they certainly were. . .. Sow the seed of 
Christian teachings broadcast, more by your example 
than by your preaching and precepts. Then you will 
serve your Master and India, and through India, hu- 
manity.” (‘“Makhzan i Masihi,” Sept. 1, 1923.) Mr. 
Natarajan’s address contained some frank and critical 
comment on missions and the Christian Church in In- 
dia, but it set in the chief place the spirit and influence 
of Christ, and advocated the view that Hindus and 
Mohammedans, imbued by that spirit, should remain 


216 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


in their own communities. Many Indian social ideals 
and relationships are undergoing a complete though 
long-drawn-out transformation under these ideas. 

A new missionary in Western India wrote recently of 
an experience which was a revelation to him of the 
extent to which Christian ideas had penetrated even in 
Hindu religious teaching: 


“Our pundit invited us to attend a bhajan-singing 
and preaching from one of the Hindu sacred books, 
of which they have a very great many. The gathering 
was held in the lecture room of a summer home of a 
Hindu lawyer from Bombay. He opens his beautiful 
home for daily services all through the month of May. 
The Guru—teacher, preacher, singer, now a demi-god, 
and after death to be deified—is from the barber caste. 
For the first time in my life, I took off my shoes before 
listening to a service, but that is a very proper thing to 
do out here. We were received with many salaams. 
Truly, these people are inherently polite. They wel- 
comed us to the very front, and we sat down at the feet 
of the famous Guru, who was sitting on a nice soft 
mattress. The rest of us were on the hard stone floor. 
The speaker, a reformer among the Hindus, preached 
strongly against idolatry and Pantheism, and argued 
against the popular view that this present life is a mere 
illusion. JI understood it only in part, for he spoke 
in Marathi; but some features were very beautiful. 
He spoke of devotion to the One True God, and calls 
his sect the “God Disciple.’ They invited us back, amid 
many salaams, to name the date when we would tell 
them of the claims of Christ. They promised to hear 
us gladly, and with open minds. Of course we are 
going. 

“As we went home, our marvel was not at the invita- 
tion: it was at the fact that around the Guru was a 
Parsi (a fire-worshipper), Hindus of many castes and 
even women. They listened approvingly as old errors 
were shattered, and as joy, love and service were ex- 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 217 


alted. Truly the impact of Christianity is a mighty in- 
fluence, even in the highest circles. They will not now 
openly accept Christ, but the old soil of caste and idol- 
atry is being broken up. Then as they see their own 
philosophies (reformed as they will be) failing to trans- 
form society, they will at last turn to that Living Dy- 
namic, Christ Jesus the Saviour of the world. They 
admit now that they know better and boast of doing 
better than their religion.” 


On the occasion of a prize distribution at a Moham- 
medan High School in Bombay, on the 15th of Janu- 
ary, 1923, His Highness, the Aga Khan, one of the 
most distinguished Mohammedan leaders in India, 
made an address in the course of which he urged the 
Mohammedans to take part in the uplift of the de- 
pressed classes. While doing so he paid the following 
tribute to Christian Missions: 


“In the days of my youth it was the fashion amongst 
certain classes of all communities to look with amused 
indifference upon the work that was being done by 
the missions of all European denominations and coun- 
tries. ‘To-day is there a single honest man who will 
refuse to honour and respect the great heroic and mag- 
nificent work at the cost of enormous wealth and la- 
bour, which Christian missions of all denominations, 
and some of the most important coming from foreign 
countries like America, France and Germany, carry on 
in this country amongst the depressed classes? I am 
glad that some of the leaders of the Hindus are starting 
to pay the Christian missions the greatest of all com- - 
pliments—imitation.” 


But there is more than imitation here. There is slow 
and unconscious, and tardily prolonged, but real social 
conversion. 

And the conversion is not social only or of the spirit 


218 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


of men who remain in the old communions. The cen- 
sus returns show that the avowed Christian community 
in India is growing faster than any other. Indeed, in 
some recent decades, the Hindus have lost ground. In 
Benares, in August, 1923, to a gathering of nearly 
5,000, representing all sections of the Hindus com- 
munity, orthodox, Brahmans, Sanyasus, Arya Sama- 
jists, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and the depressed classes, 
the president, Pandit Malaviya, said in the course of his 
presidential address: “We the Hindus, do not realise 
our situation. In the course of time, we will slowly be 
converted by Christians and Mohammedans and we 
will become an extinct race!” He also exhorted the 
audience not to have any ill-feeling toward other reli- 
gious communities such as Christians and Moham- 
medans. (‘“The Times of India,” Aug. 22, ’23.) 

In olden days a great deal was made of the reflex in- 
fluence of missions. What men had in mind was the 
reflex spiritual influence, the evidence of the sure spir- 
itual law that those who give most ever have most to 
give and that the Christian Churches at home are en- 
riched rather than impoverished by all that they send 
abroad. In later years the argument from the reflex 
benefit of missions was commercialised and it was ar- 
gued by some that trade and political influence were ad- 
vantaged by missions, That use of the argument de- 
stroyed it. Missions are a pure unselfishness, and any 
other way of construing them is poisonous. But now 
that we have asserted this view, and it is to be hoped 
are in no danger of allowing false views to taint the 
missionary motive, we need to return to the truth that 
giving is enriching. Participation in missions enriches 
our conception of God. The enterprise is an effort to 
share a worthy thought of God with the world, and 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 2I19 


the process enlarges and enriches that thought. Dr. 
Endicott of Toronto set forth this true idea in an ad- 
dress at the Washington Missionary Conference in 


1925: 


“T have had three unexpected experiences in life. 
The first was when I became a Christian. I was not a 
candidate. I was taken unawares, but I was really 
brought to my Lord Christ. Christianity from that day 
has always been a real, an amazing, a beautiful and 
gracious factor in my life. It has never become com- 
monplace. Again, I did not expect to be a Christian 
minister and even less did I expect to be a foreign mis- 
sionary. 

“What, then, was it about this missionary movement 
that most deeply moved me and led me to its support in 
thought and life? 

“Tt actually brought to me an enrichment of the very 
conception of Christianity itself. That is an advantage 
well worth gaining. I have had conceptions of a dif- 
ferent kind presented to me, and I have lived under 
the dominion of them for many years of my life—for 
example, a conception something like this: Christianity, 
as an unearthly thing, so unrelated to the life of the 
world, so precarious and so narrow, so aloof that the 
best way to suggest it by picture would be as a little 
ditch or as a narrow channel, in which is a canoe in 
which a man sits bolt upright for fear that it will cap- 
size. That is Christianity, as it has been often pre- 
sented. Now, what the foreign missionary enterprise 
did for me in this realm was to suggest another picture 
of a sailing ship out on the broad ocean with all its sails 
unfurled, and bounding over to the ends of the earth, 
looking for new cargo, wholly unafraid and in no sense 
restricted. 

“Tt makes a tremendous difference which conception 
is to prevail in the minds of the people. I have ceased 
to wonder that some folk shrink from the Christian 
religion, that they see no attractiveness in it, that it 
makes no large appeal to them; but I have found in the 


220 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


foreign missionary movement, to which I have dedi- 
cated my life, something which makes the Christian reli- 
gion spacious, ennobling, divinely generous, really giv- 
ing us a God Who is big enough to worship, and a 
human race worthy of being redeemed, and worthy of 
commanding my service.” 


A large part of the movement toward Christian unity 
during the last century has been due to foreign mis- 
sions. The essential unity and simplicity of the mis- 
sionary aim, the magnitude and urgency of the task, 
the pressure of the work, its objects, its nature, its con- 
ditions, the fundamental community of the Christian 
motive, the singleness of the love and Lordship of 
Christ are only a few of the considerations which have 
drawn together missions on the field and the mission- 
ary advocacy and administration at home. And this 
solidarity of the foreign mission work and of its forces 
has reacted on the life and organisation and spirit of 
the home Church. Our denominationalism has been 
moderated and our purpose of co-operation confirmed. 
Many of our great united undertakings at home are the 
direct fruitage of the foreign missions spirit. 

From the outset the work of the foreign missionaries 
embraced those social ideals and ministries which the 
Church at home is only now recovering as part of her 
programme and mission. Social settlements are a con- 
ception whose origin falls within the memory of the 
present generation, but the first foreign mission station 
was nothing but such a settlement, and foreign mission 
stations have been nothing else ever since. The current 
controversy over the social gospel, as we have already 
seen, was settled instantaneously by the foreign mis- 
sions enterprise at the outset, and it has always bound 


THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 221 


together the oral statement and the personal and insti- 
tutional expression of the Gospel. 

And we owe a great debt to foreign missions for 
their contributions to our wider acceptance of the 
Christian view of mankind and the world. To the 
great majority of missionaries the ideas which lie back 
of the League of Nations and of all movements for 
human sympathy and co-operation are axiomatic, and 
the influence of missionaries has been one of the most 
powerful forces in the world working for inter-racial 
understanding and for human unity. 

But we turn back again from these gains which we 
have reaped at home from foreign missions to note 
four great services which have been of the very warp 
and woof of the enterprise. (1) It has brought eman- 
cipation to woman and has done more than anything 
else to supply her in Christianity with the one influence 
which teaches her to use her liberty. (2) It has pene- 
trated, as we have seen, the non-Christian religions 
and has moulded in every one of these its fundamental 
views of God and the world and human society. (3) 
It has powerfully affected ideas of race and race rela- 
tionships by its actual practice, with whatever short- 
comings and limitations, of race equality. As Mr. 
Loram, of Natal, testifies of South Africa: 


“Tt is said that a certain wise old Native chief divided 
Europeans into two classes, viz., white men and mis- 
sionaries. The distinction is significant. To the 
thoughtful Native the white man is the disintegrating 
force which has broken down his tribal customs and 
sanctions, and has replaced them with nothing but in- 
numerable and vexatious governmental restrictions in- 
troduced for the benefit of the white man. On the 


222 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 


other hand, he knows the missionary to be his friend. 
It is the missionary who educates his children, who 
writes his letters, who cares for him in sickness and 
sorrow, who acts as a buffer between him and the local 
storekeeper or Government official, and whose motives 
are always altruistic.” 


(4) And lastly, however inadequately and ineffectively, 
still with real fruitage and result, the enterprise of for- 
eign missions has preached Christ. It has made Him 
known all over and through the non-Christian world. 
And He is always and everywhere the deepest spring 
of life and change. “Behold,” says He, “I make all 
things new.” 


INDEX 


Aga Khan, 217 
Amir Ali Syed, 174 


Banerjea on Duff, 102 

Barton, James L., “Daybreak in 
Turkey,’ 132 f. 

Bashford, James W., 176 

Bliss, E. M., “A Concise His- 
tory of Missions,” 40 

Bliss, Howard E., “The Modern 
Missionary,” 88 f. 

Bohme, 13 

Boxer troubles, 20 

Brainerd, David, 106 ff. 

Brewer, Justice, 121 

Brown, William Adams, 53 f. 

Bryce, Lord, 83 ff. 

Buddhism, 49 


Carey, 41 f., 96 ff., 206 

Chesterton, 58 

China and Education, 156 ff. 

China Treaties, 128 

Christie, Dugald, 85 

Christo Samaj, Memorandum 
of, 50 ff., 75 ff. 

Church, Ideal of indigenous, 54- 
63, 176 f., 182 f. 

Church of Christ in Japan, 
Creed of, 63 f., 183 f. 

Clarke, “A Short Study of 
Christian Missions,” 199 ff. 

Clough, 175 

Coates, Harper H., 49 

Cotton, Bishop, on Duff, 1or 

Curzon, 69 f. 


Das, Andrew Thakur, 61 f. 
Dennis, “Christian Missions and 
Social Progress,” 191, 203 f. 
Denominationalism, 68 ff. 
Dickinson, Lowes, 179 f. 
Duff, Alexander, 100 ff. 


223 


Ebina, 146 

Education, 77 ff., 150 ff. 
Eliot, Charles W., 81 f. 
Elvira, canon of, 27 
Endicott, James, 219 
Evarts, Jeremiah, 112 


Fulton, George W., 48 


Gandhi, 174 

Grant, President, 129 
Gregory VII, 38 

Griffin on S. J. Mills, 108 £. 


Harnack, “The Expansion of 
Christianity,” 12, 23 ff., 28 ff. 

Hebich, Samuel, 114 

Hiraiwa, 47 

Hofmann, 13 

Holzmann, 13 

Hort, 58 

Hunter, Sir William, 206 


Imai, 46 

India, United Church in, Creed 
of, 64 ff. 

Indians in South America, 138 

International Missionary Coun- 

cil on Co-operation, 89 ff. 


Jackson, Arthur, 85 f. 


Janvier, C. A. R., 79 
Japan, education in, 80 
Johnston, Sir H. H., 189 
Judson, Adoniram, 109 f. 


Kaka, 1092 ff. 
Keshub Chunder Sen, 71 f. 
Kosui, Abbot, 49 


Lawley, Sir Arthur, 204 
Lichtwardt, Dr., 211 
Loram, Charles T., 151, 221 


224 THE CHURCH 


Lowrie, Walter, 112 
Lucas, Bernard, 61 
Lull, Raymund, 39 


McGiffert, “The 
Age,” 11, 12f., 18 

McLean, John, 78 

MacLear, ““The Missionary His- 
tory of the Middle Ages,” 
32 ff. 

Maine, Sir Henry, on Duff, 
102 f. 

Malaviya, Pandit, 218 

Meinicke, 205 

Methodist Missions, 41 

Michie, Alexander, 190 

Mills, Samuel J., 108 ff. 

Miyagawa, 46 f. 

Moravians, 41, 42, I14 

Morgenthau, Henry, 82 

Mozoomdar, 72 

Muller, Hugo A., 92 


Apostolic 


Natarajan, 172 f., 214 

National Missionary Society of 
India, 139, 181 

Nevius, John L., 43, 111 f. 


Okuma, 49 

Paul’s Missionary Methods, 
18 ff. 

Relations of Missions and 


Church, 73 ff., 177 f. 
Religions, non-Christian, as in- 
fluenced by Christianity, 169 f. 
Religious liberty, 127 f. 
Rowell, Newton W., 
143 f. 
Russell, Bertrand, on China, 
207 ff. 


124 ff., 


Saeed, Mirza, 192 ff., 196 
Salisbury, Lord, 171 f. 
Sawayama, Paul, 62 


AND MISSIONS 


Schlegel, 32 

Seward, William H., 129 

Siam and religious liberty, 130 

Smith, George, on Carey, 98 ff. 

State and Christianity, 12t ff. 

State and Education, 153 ff., 
162 f. 

Statistics, 176, 210 

Stevens, Frederick W., 205 

Students, Foreign, in the West, 


169 f. 
Sun, The New York, 187 


Taikyo Dendo, 45 

Taiping Rebellion, 44 

Thoburn, Bishop, 116 f. 

Thompson, Henry B., 205 

Tientsin Times, 190 

Trevelyn, Sir Charles, 102, 174 

Trumbull, David, 166 

Turkey and religious freedom, 
Tati, 

— and education, 155 


Uemura, 46 f., 184 

Union and co-operation, 60 f. 

United Church in India, Creed 
of, 64 ff. 

Unoccupied fields, 137 f. 


Vail, Charles E., 86 
Venn, Henry, 103 ff. 
Verbeck, Guido, 151, 166 


Von Schubert, “Outline of 
Church History,” 13, 39 
Von Welz, 40 


Wanless, W. J., 86f. 

Warneck, 201 

Welch, William H., 212 

Westcott, 13 

Whitney, W. O., 207 

Willoughby, on Bantu ignorance 
of equality, 213 f. 

Wittichen, 13 


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